Chapter 11: A Visit to the Oracle- Part I


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Harry lay back on the cold, metallic chair, trying hard not to think about how much it resembled what a dentist chair would look like during a nightmare. This was where his body would spend the next few hours resting while his mind traveled into the Matrix for the first time since being freed from slavery within the virtual world. The monitor recording his heart rate was beeping and blipping at an accelerated pace, revealing the boy's anxiety. Seeing this, the friendly face of Remus looked down on him with a reassuring smile and eyes warm with affection. Harry really liked the man.

Remus was middle-aged, with a brown mustache that made him look dignified and mature. Quite the opposite of Sirius's black mustache that added a roguish quality to the ship captain. They both had kind, playful eyes though. Harry had learned they had been shipmates together before Sirius earned the right to his own vessel. Remus had chosen to follow his friend rather than try to branch out on his own.

"Don't worry, Harry. You'll be in good hands. Sirius is one of the best. In spite of the fact that he acts like he's four years old half the time, he's a complete professional. And Tonks can handle any sort of emergency. There's nothing to worry about," the man reassured Harry.

Harry nodded but couldn't help but think of how things could go wrong. "Remus? What if the worst happens, and…we die in there?" Harry couldn't help but remember how afraid and weak he had been when the Sentinels had nearly discovered the ship.

"Don't think like that, Harry. Nothing is going to happen. You're all going to make it out of there just fine," Remus reassured him.

Harry already knew what would really happen if he or his friends were to 'die' while plugged in. The raw facts about the hacking process had been downloaded into this brain during his training. But he still wanted to hear Remus say that everything would be fine. The truth was that if a hacker died or was disconnected while in the Matrix, they would at best be unconscious for a few days and have a very traumatic experience. There was still a chance for someone to go into a semi-permanent coma or even die of the shock, but things were better now than they were back in the days during the war between Zion and the Machines. Before, there was no buffer for the consciousness like there was on the post-war second and third generation ships. Very few people used to survive a sudden disconnection, or their death in the digitized world; it had been almost unheard of then. Now, however, the more advanced computers developed in Zion stored a person's last 10 seconds of mental awareness in a buffer, and in the event of a disconnect the critical part of the hacker's brain was reset to the buffer state. That was certainly risky, with a chance of causing brain damage, a coma, or worse, but far better than the alternative of almost certain death.

With one last smile from Remus, Harry felt the needle being inserted into the receptacle in the back of his head. There was a sudden scream of white noise in his mind and then his senses began being flooded with signals. Sights. Sounds. Physical feeling. They were all impulses being fed into his mind from the program construct surrounding him in virtual space. Harry could almost sense the flow of code into the simulation of his nervous system. And then his mind began processing it all in a more natural manner and he relaxed.

Harry opened his eyes, his virtual ones, and looked around. He was standing next to an old Muggle telephone, which he knew from his training to actually be a gateway between the digital reality of the Matrix and external electronic world. These gateways were also vulnerable points through which hackers were able to enter the Matrix without detection. Harry was in an old, bare room with wooden walls and a simple bed. They were in a hotel room. Standing next to him were Tonks, Sirius, and Eon. Their old and worn real life clothing of plain browns and green earth tones were now replaced by sharp outfits that looked new and clean. Beneath a long, heavy trench coat, Eon wore an all black outfit consisting of loose-fitting slacks and a dark, off-black T-shirt. Sirius wore a red-velvet business suit coat over a charcoal black vest and deep blue shirt, making him look almost aristocratic with his well-trimmed mustache. Tonks wore black pants and a red blouse, with a solid black coat draped over the entire ensemble.

There was a reason they all had long coats. It was much easier to conceal the weapons they had programmed the Construct to provide them with when they were loaded into the Matrix. Harry looked to his own black robes, reminiscent of his Hogwarts school robes, but cut in the front at the waist so that his legs could move freely. Harry checked the weapons holsters to make sure everything had loaded properly. Then he looked carefully through the black shades that were identical to those worn by his three companions. Through the sunglasses he could see the code streaming around him as if he were sitting at the deck of the Lupin watching the monitors. He could see the symbols representing various subroutines and data connecting each object to the controlling programs beneath the surface of the virtual world.

"Ready to go, Harry?" Sirius asked once Harry had taken a second to orient himself.

"Yeah, I'm good," the young man responded with a nod.

"Tonks," the hovership captain nodded to his young protégé.

"I have the Exit covered," she said with a nod back to the captain. She immediately began setting up several computer systems in the hotel room. With these virtual replicas, she could actually interface with the Matrix code from within the Matrix, and do so stealthily. She would be able to subtly monitor and manipulate programs more easily than Remus could as an operator on the outside. There was a risk of detection, but then, there was always that risk. Sirius, Eon, and Harry, exited the room. With a stroke from Tonks on the keyboard, the door locked behind them, only to open at the touch of one of the group.

Harry felt on-edge back in this virtual world. Where before he had been uncomfortable with the fact that they were around Muggles, now it was the knowledge that every person they might encounter could be a potential enemy and everything else was the enemy. While the program that made up the stairwell they were walking down did not think for itself, the architects controlling the stairwell did and they could at any moment turn the entire building against them if they became aware of the group's presence. The Machines wouldn't, of course. That was far too damaging to the Matrix and would cause Them too much trouble. But they could.

Luckily, they were all but invisible to the outside world. When the code representing their consciousness was inserted into the Matrix, it was wrapped in a shell that disguised their identities while closing them off to the search programs written into the Matrix designed to discover hackers. As Harry, Eon, and Sirius exited the back of the hotel lobby, Harry could see the sentient programs around them give them no notice at all. The only ones who even looked their direction were the minds of humans still plugged into the machines responding to the visual cues they were receiving.

The trio took the back alleys and side streets of the town. They were in a reconstruction of the city of New York, but far from the urban center where security was the tightest. There would be fewer passersby here, though the streets were still busy with people going about their daily lives. A group of young kids passed by on Harry's left. Harry glanced to the side, as did Eon and Sirius, just in time to see the traffic lights on the side street turn red simultaneously. As they passed the next intersection, Harry looked and noticed the same exact thing happened to the lights down that street as well. They all turned red at the same time for as many blocks ahead as he could see.

"Déjà vu," Harry muttered to himself.

"What did you say?" Sirius asked, stopping dead still alongside Eon.

"Déjà vu," Harry repeated a little louder. "I thought I saw something happen twice in a row."

"What exactly did you see, Harry," Eon asked. "Was it the exact same thing happening twice, or was it two similar things?"

Right. Alterations in the Matrix. Harry remembered that when things in the Matrix code changed, whatever event happened just before the change would be repeated. Harry frowned. "I think it was two different things," Harry said. "I saw a set of traffic lights all turn red at the same time at the last intersection. Then on the next block the lights all turned red at the same time again."

Eon and Sirius relaxed. "Nothing to worry about then," Sirius said. "Just a pattern in the traffic control program. The same thing actually used to happen in the real world because people used computers to control the traffic lights."

"Wow, Sirius, I didn't realize you were that old," Harry quipped.

A grin broke out on Sirius's face. Harry was really fitting into their little group. "Read it in some 20th and 21st century fiction stories—"

Sirius was suddenly cut off from speaking as the sounds of loud barking filled the air. A pack of feral dogs leaped out of almost nowhere, coming from the dead end alley they had just passed. The barking dogs' jaws snapping at the trio menacingly. There were seven of the mutts, each a different breed of dog, but none of them small.

It was extremely odd. Dogs simply did not just attack a group of humans for no reason. Why would it be programmed in this way? But none of them had time to consider the implications. The dogs charged.

Harry reacted on instinct, spinning his body and lashing out with a kick towards the gray-furred hound that had leaped towards him. Compared to the speeds that Eon and Tonks attacked at, the dog might as well have been jumping in slow motion. Harry's kick smashed the animal in the ribs and knocked it through the air to crash into the alley wall with a whimper. Eon handled the pair of dogs that had jumped at him in a similar, but more efficient manner. His hand sliced down on one with a vicious chop, catching the animal in the back of the neck before immediately stepping forward and bringing the same hand to connect with the collarbone of the second animal and send it flying back the way it came.

And then there was a much louder, fiercer bark that froze the remaining dogs in place. Harry turned to see a great black dog standing between him, Eon, and the remaining four dogs, growling at the attacking canines. Those dogs began to yip, placing their tails between their legs. When the large black dog took several threatening steps forward and barked loudly, the pack of wild dogs scattered.

Harry stared at the big black dog. He remembered it. It was the exact same dog that had led him from the Dursleys to his first ill-fated encounter with Sirius. But where…

Harry watched as the black dog morphed before his eyes, the fur blurring away as it stood up on its hind legs, which suddenly thickened into the legs of a man. Sirius stood there with a grin on his face. "That's right," he said with a barking laugh. "I'm the ALPHA male."

"But…" Harry began, than stopped and looked back. "You're…you're an animagus!"

"Ani-what-is?" Sirius asked with a frown.

"Animagus," Eon answered before Harry. "A witch or wizard who can turn into an animal. One of the Hogwarts professors was one."

"Well, I don't know about being a wizard," Sirius said with a smirk, "but I can assure you I'm not a witch. I can turn back into a dog and you can check my gender if you want…"

"Um, no thanks, Sirius," Harry was quick to reply.

"Anyway, there, kid, I've been able to do that since before I was freed. I just always sort of identified with dogs, and I had a big black one just like the one I can turn into. Don't know how it happened, but one day I was rolling around with my dog and the next thing I knew I had turned into an exact copy of him."

"I'm guessing that's when you figured out you were in the Matrix?" Harry asked.

"Well, um, no. At first I thought I was stuck in a Disney movie. But I was freed shortly after that, and then it all made sense," Sirius admitted sheepishly. "Still, though, I've got the full code for the animal form in my head, and I can access it at will inside the digital world. Quite handy when sneaking around, as programs only check humans to see if they belong where they are. They assume any animal they come across will be a Program."

"But why were we attacked?" Harry asked. "It doesn't make any sense for a program to act that way."

Sirius shrugged. "Dunno, Harry. But we're not going to scrub this mission just because of an anomaly like this. It's too important."

Harry Potter looked at Sirius and then over to Eon and shrugged his shoulders. The rest of the way towards the Oracle, Harry had some things to think about. If Sirius could change into an animal, and Tonks could alter her appearance at will, then perhaps everyone at Hogwarts was there because they had an abnormal effect inside the Matrix. Perhaps Professor MacGonagal was trapped there as well. Maybe all of his friends were Potentials. Maybe he could free them all.


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After knocking on the door, Harry and Eon waited in the silent hallway of the nondescript apartment in which the Oracle was housed. According to Sirius, the Oracle never stayed in any one place long, always moving on to a new location every couple of weeks. In addition to the officially authorized Programs in the Matrix, there also some rogue programs, as well, some of which would harm the Oracle of they could. To see the Oracle, they had sent word to "her" ahead of time that they were coming. If she were there.

Of course, everyone knew that "she" was really an "it" and not human at all. The Oracle was also a Program, but one that had helped to free many minds. It was something of an open secret that if humans from the outside wanted a specific insight into the Matrix, the Oracle would point the way. She also was very astute at judging the potential of freed minds to manipulate the Matrix code from within. She never directly worked against the Matrix architecture, but she didn't work against the humans on the outside who hacked in as most Programs would. It was part of her mission to help identify what the Programs had called a "systemic anomaly" and what those in Zion called The One. In a way, she was the unofficial liaison between humans and the AI.

A Jamaican woman answered the door. "She been 'specting you," the woman said, looking them over. "Come in and wait wit' de others."

The three walked into what amounted to a sitting room where several young children played together. Harry's eyes narrowed as he looked to each child. There was a difference in the way the threads of code connected to them than to other minds. Harry looked over to Eon. He had noticed it too.

"Sirius, I think we should pay attention to what happens to these kids. They're different," Eon said.

"Yes, they're all Potentials," Sirius nodded, "gathered from all over the Matrix to see what she makes of them." Then the captain looked at the two of them and frowned before continuing. "But it would be rude of us to try and track them or trace them from here. We get to come here and visit, but we can't tag any of these kids. Think of this place as being like Switzerland: perfectly neutral," Sirius explained. "Of course, if we later run across them and our facial recognition program identifies them, well, then, that would be perfectly fair," he added with a conspiratorial whisper that wasn't really a whisper at all.

Eon and Harry smiled together. They would remember each of these children.

"You," the Jamaican said, pointing to Eon, "you can go in. The o'der two, you will have ta wait here. The Oracle will not see yous today."

Harry's face fell. Maybe he wasn't special enough for the Oracle to want to see him?

Sirius initially frowned at this, but was going to go along with it, but as soon as Sirius saw Harry's crestfallen expression Sirius grabbed Harry's arm and pulled the younger boy behind him. Harry had worked too hard to be denied. When the door was opened for Eon to step through, Sirius barged in right behind. Sirius knew that once the door closed there was no telling if it would open again or not. Doors had a tendency to do that inside the Matrix. And he was not about to let anyone stop him from having Harry see the Oracle.

The Jamaican attendant tried to protest, but Sirius beat her to the punch.

"Now you hold on a minute, woman," Sirius growled, bristling at the lady with thick spectacles standing by a stove in what looked to be an ordinary kitchen. "Harry here has worked hard to be able to come to see you, and you're not going to brush him aside just like that! Oracle or not, you can't treat Harry that way!"

The Oracle looked over at Harry and then sighed. "Well, now that you're here, I guess it really can't be helped. Hello there, kiddo. I must say, Divinations class just isn't the same without you."

"Professor Trelawney?"

"In the flesh," she said with a smile, "or not, depending on how you want to look at it." Professor Trelawney, the Oracle, smiled at her attendant who then backed out of the room, eying Sirius with a touch of hostility.

"Wait, this is Professor Trelawney? The Hogwarts Divinations teacher and seer?" Eon asked.

"Bingo. I never did get a chance to have you in my class, Mr. Anderson. Or do you prefer to go by Eon, now?"

"Eon, if you don't mind."

"Wait, hang on here," Sirius spluttered. "You both know the Oracle already?"

"Actually, I've known the two of them longer than you have, Mr. Black," she said with a smile. "Unfortunately, you choosing to come in here and bring young Harry with you when you did has…complicated matters. Had I foreseen you forcing your way in here, I probably would have decided not to be here at all. Would have made things a lot easier on all of us, I'm sure."

"I don't understand," Harry said. "How does this complicate matters? And why couldn't you predict what would happen?"

"I see you've forgotten some of your Divinations training, Mr. Potter. If you remember, we can only see through the decisions we understand. Mr. Black choosing to disregard my decision not to see the two of you simply because you made the face you did is quite fascinating, but not something I can yet grasp," the Oracle said with a smile. "I get it that your expression was adorably pitiful, but I never fathomed Sirius would be swayed by a mere look. But I'm afraid our time is quite short. No time to explore such matters. You came to me for a reason, didn't you?"

Sirius nodded, a bit off-balance from the turn of events. "Yes, it's about the special area 'here' these two are part of. The 'magic' school."

"And you want to know how these two fit into things, and why they are special," she said with a kind smile. "You're right to ask. But, I'm afraid I'm not really going to be able to help you answer those questions. I can tell you this, though, both Eon and Harry are Potentials, and strong ones. I was going to tell Eon that he could be the One, but…"

"But what?" Eon asked.

"Well, I was going to just leave it out there like that and let you fill in the answer. And whatever the answer you gave, that would have been right. Since we don't have time for that sort of thing, though, I'll just say you need to wake yourself up, and then you'll be something else. You have the Gift, just like Harry, perhaps even more so. Which is why you were brought to Hogwarts in the first place."

"But Harry was always better than me at magic. I could barely get anything to work at all."

"Yes, there is that," Trelawney said with a frown. "The two of you have different purposes; that's one of the few things about that boy that is perfectly clear."

"What do you mean by that," Sirius asked.

"I'm afraid, Mr. Sirius Black, that all I can say is that we're all here to do what we're all here to do."

"Then what am I here to do?" Harry asked. He hadn't noticed how still Sirius and Eon had gone after the Oracle had just spoken.


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Remus cursed to himself. He could see the code flash and change. An alert had gone up a short while ago but it was just now filtering onto his screen. Too late to warn them in time. And where were Eon, Harry, and Sirius? They had just disappeared. He called up Tonks with a touch of the button. "Tonks, something has gone wrong. They've cut the hard line. You're going to need to get out of there and find a new Exit. I'll give you instructions as soon as you're—damn. They're already outside your hallway and moving in."

Tonks swore. She quickly scooped up her equipment and placed it in a bag. If she got out of there she would need it at the next Exit point and there wouldn't be a chance to load it back in. There was a noise just outside the the door. She didn't have much time here, either. It would take the Machines little time at all to override the lockout she had placed on the lock.

The door to the room splintered open and several armed men burst into the room firing their weapons.


Author's Note: Expect the next update in the next couple days. The chapter was just getting too long.