Summary: Harry's next project is underway!
Chapter 11: Calculation
"Merlin, Harry, this sort of looks like you're trying to track a serial killer or something!"
Katie, bored with Alicia and Angelina stuck in class, had tagged along as Harry went to the 'project room' Professor Sinistra had gotten for them. It was near the theaters and had started life as simply another abandoned classroom. There were tons of those throughout the sprawling castle, enough so that Harry was legitimately curious if Hogwarts had ever actually had enough students to use them all. Or if it was merely a case of there being certain classes that had come and gone through time and fads.
The rooms they'd been allowed to turn into their theaters, at least, were an example of the latter. Originally, the castle had housed various armories, blacksmith forges, and so on. In times past, there had even been classes on magical forging! It was…sort of a specialty field now, however. Not in big enough demand to even have it as an elective at Hogwarts. The theater rooms had each originally been training halls, intended for those training with specific weapons to practice swordsmanship, bow marksmanship, and so on. Long disused and fairly out-of-the-way, they were each nevertheless sizable, and Dumbledore had offered them up for conversion. Each now contained a 10-meter movie screen and rows of elevated seating. Smallish by mundane theater standards, but more than enough for a decent setup, considering each small theater here at Hogwarts was set up to seat just 40 people each.
The project room itself, which had started as a place for Harry and Professor Sinistra to build the projectors and various other bits and bobs needed for the theaters, had formerly been a classroom with some very out-of-date anatomy dummies and whatnot. Likely intended to teach students where to stick the pointy end of a sword, for either best un-aliving your opponent, or best keeping-them-alive if you weren't feeling overly murderous. There hadn't been a lot left of whatever other original class material had been needed, and most of what had remained had been moved into other storage elsewhere. With the former bits and bobs removed and some desks, a rune table, chalkboards, and so on added, it had given them a decent workspace.
A workspace that was now mostly Harry's, honestly. Since Professor Sinistra had her own workroom as a professor, they now only really needed the space if something broke down with one of the projectors. Or if they decided to make more of them, which they had discussed doing, with Harry proposing that they open an actual theater over the summer. Something which the bemused professor wasn't against, since they'd really only be making the hardware and letting someone else run it as passive income for the both of them.
For the moment, however, the project room was almost entirely Harry's, which explained Katie's comment. After finishing the theater project, he'd taken to drawing future plans and ideas out all over a dozen mobile chalkboards. He'd even gotten some string to tie between boards, to show how one idea was linked to another. It wasn't quite like a serial-killer-hunting corkboard. But Harry could see why she'd made the comparison.
"Not trying to track down killers, Kat! It's only my terribly evil plan to drag the Wizarding World out of the Dark Ages!"
Katie snorted at his over-the-top delivery. Which was just fine with Harry. She could dismiss his evil plan to save the world (from stupid, backwards wizards at least) if she wanted. That way, no one would realize his nefarious schemes until it was too late!
"So, whatcha working on aside from the movie stuff? I mean, you're pretty much done with that, right? Just raking in the galleons now, yeah?"
Harry flinched, then sighed.
"Er, that's…sort of what I've been trying to figure out?"
Katie blinked, looking around at the dozen sprawling chalkboards full of ideas and diagrams.
"You…look like you have ideas, though?"
Harry sighed and cleared off the two comfy chairs in the room, falling into one and waving Katie to the other. She shrugged and flopped into it as he thought about how to explain the problem. Or, rather, problems.
"I have a lot of ideas. The thing is, though, that most of them require Ancient Runes since they involve enchanting on some level. I got lucky that Professor Sinistra helped with the projectors. She already had a good understanding of the runes involved and was interested in the idea of bringing a movie theater to Hogwarts. But I can't just expect a Professor to be interested in every project. And, despite my best efforts, Professor Babbling and I think I won't be ready to empower my own Runes until next year."
Katie stared at him.
"Wait. You're going to do runes a year early? No…you said empowering your own Runes. Wait, wait, wait. Are you telling you you're almost to the NEWT Runes class, where you can actually do the magic bits?!"
It was Harry's turn to blink, then pause. Had he…not told anyone that?
"Ummm…yessss? I've known Runes would be critical to all the stuff I want to do for a long time. So I'd studied several languages worth of them before I ever came to Hogwarts. As well as worked really hard on my magical control…"
Katie just stared for long enough that Harry started to squirm. Finally, she shook her head.
"Harry, that's crazy. I don't think I've ever mentioned it, but my family owns the Cog and Bell Clockmakers shop. We make and repair magical clocks of all kinds. Which means I know exactly what it means that you're far enough ahead for Professor Babbling to think you can start actively empowering runes next year. You're seriously almost ready for the Transference ritual?"
Harry blushed, embarrassed by how impressed she looked. With Pandora to help him, it felt like he hadn't exactly earned that look. He'd put in a lot of effort, yes. But he also had quite a few shortcuts simply because of Pandora.
"It's…not that big a deal, Katie."
"Yes, it bloody well is! I'm expected to get my Ancient Runes NEWT, but my family isn't crazy enough to think anyone can get it early!"
Okay, so…maybe it was. Quickly, Harry scrambled to redirect the conversation.
"A-anyway. Most of my projects use enchanting at the base, so I need Ancient Runes to anchor and power charms at the very least. So I'm sort of…stuck. Lots of ideas, but pretty much all of them are out of reach until next year."
Katie looked like she really didn't want to let the Ancient Runes thing go…but she eventually sighed and waved dismissively.
"Just subcontract the work, doofus."
Harry blinked.
"But…I don't want someone to steal my ideas?"
Katie stared at him in confusion.
"A magical contract, Harry. One that says they can't reuse your work without permission, if it's something new. Heck, if you want to be really paranoid, subcontract two people to each do half of something under contract. If neither of them know what the other half is, even if they found a loophole in the contract, they couldn't reproduce your end result."
Harry gaped at her, Katie looking progressively more smug as she realized that Harry hadn't thought of the simple solution after all…
"Har. For a genius, you're kind of an idiot sometimes."
Harry didn't pout. He didn't! No matter what Pandora and Katie both claimed later…
... ...
"Okay, Pan, think we've split this up enough?"
Pandora hovered around in her Sprite form, looking over the various chalkboards.
"Enough or not, I don't think we can split it up farther. We're almost asking for trouble as it is, trying to combine three different people's work for an end product. Hells Harry, we're definitely going to want to redo this one eventually. It's too important to question the stability of it later."
Harry sighed. She was right, of course.
"I know, Pan. But you know as well as I do that this project is the next logical step. A lot of our later plans just won't work if we don't get something like this functional. I'm honestly shocked that no one has done it yet. Even more so than the movie projectors."
Pandora humphed as she settled on top of one of the chalkboards.
"Bah. There's only a dozen or so people that get a NEWT in Ancient Runes each year. It's a hard subject, Harry. Even when Hogwarts had more students, I doubt the number was ever more than double that. In order to make the leap to this, they'd need that NEWT, plus at least an OWL in Arithmancy, and they'd have to be a muggleborn or half-blood. All of that, and it could really only have been pulled off in the last fifty years. At least, unless they came up with the idea before muggles. Which, well, we've talked about that before."
Harry nodded. That had, in fact, been something they'd talked about several times over the years, trying to understand just why the Wizarding World was so backward. A bit to their surprise, they'd ultimately come to a conclusion that wasn't as harsh on Wizards and Witches as they'd originally suspected it would be. Nor as they suspected the majority of current muggleborns secretly thought. In reality, they'd come to the conclusion that it was mostly just…numbers.
A study of ye olden day wizardry development versus modern development actually showed that wizard kind had once been far out ahead of their muggle counterparts. The floo network predated telephones by centuries, just as one example. Broomsticks, of course, beat airplanes by an even wider margin. The trouble had only come, and that at so slow a rate it hadn't been noticed, once the Statute of Secrecy had been established. As the magical and mundane worlds had grown farther and farther apart, the magical community had lost access to the collective imagination of the world's mundane geniuses.
Which, as it happened, was a problem. The ratio of magical humans versus non-magical humans averaged around 500 to 1 in favor of the mundane population. Those numbers were even worse at the moment, in Europe at least, due to the rapid series of major wars. Not just the magical wars, but the non-magical World Wars had killed quite a few magicals by virtue of carpet bombing and area artillery fire being non-discriminatory in who it killed. The historical worldwide average was around 500 to 1, however. And that number was a little sobering when you realized that, assuming all else was equal, there were 500 times more geniuses in the mundane world than in the magical.
Inevitably, Wizards and Witches just didn't have as many innovators. Something that only grew worse as traditions set in, anti-muggle sentiment rose in many places, and magical families with the inside-track on every industry worked to preserve their own power by shutting out the new blood. In many parts of the world, that last part wasn't even prejudice at work. No, it was simple, old-fashioned greed and inherited wealth at work. Why would you deliberately teach someone else the secret tricks to your successful family business?
No, even for good people, the instinct was to look after your family first, something that was just as true in the muggle world as the magical. It just hurt the overall development of the magical community more than the mundane world by virtue of fewer innovators available to compete against each other, or geniuses to reverse engineer another's methods. Hell, Harry had every intention of doing it himself, even if he hoped he'd be more responsible about how long and how tightly he held onto the secrets. Which meant he couldn't even really blame the families keeping a tight hold on their own developments and methods.
"Alright, Pan. I think we've got this. The guidelines are loose enough to let our subcontractors figure out if our arrays are wrong and tweak them. But the end results each of the two calculation steps will feed the final matrix should be compatible. Now, we just need to find the right people and get a contract written up…"
Pandora fluttered off the chalkboard again, looking over the arrays described on the three separate sets of boards with a critical eye and considerably more processing power than Harry could bring to bear. She filtered everything through the memories of the older magicals she'd been pieced together from, looking for issues. After several minutes of careful checking and crosschecking, she nodded.
"Cruder than either of us would like. We really will have to remake this eventually. But it should work. And it will be a game changer if it does, even if no one will realize it for a while, most likely. Well, aside from some of the muggleborn and half-bloods that have kept up with current technology. A few of them might make the mental leap…if they haven't been corrupted by too much time in the magical world."
Harry chuckled and nodded, copying the chalkboard notes down onto three sheaves of paper. Then copying those into the password-locked notebook that was his personal copy of the entire project. Contained within was all the work the pair had done on something truly new…
A purely magical calculator that could handle the extra, magical properties and functions of Arithmancy.
... ... ... ... ...
A/N: It's Alive! For those of you that don't pay attention...this story is one of my current 'secondary' stories. As of right now, I can only commit to updating three stories a month, with each story getting roughly 15k words. Two of those stories are locked in at any one time (right now, those are My Hero Automata and Can One Displaced Hero Save the Galaxy?). The third story always goes up for vote by my patrons, with the winner of the monthly poll getting the final big update of each month. For the last year, that's mostly been One Piece: Halfway Broken. It won eleven straight times last year, with the story that finally broke its hold on the year being A Very Confused Pokemon Adventure. Which one in December (2024). Halfway Broken won again in January, but lost the February poll to Harry Potter: Pandora's box :-). Hence, this story has never actually been 'dead.' It just hadn't managed to win the poll in entirely too long. There is a mechanism in place with the poll to give vote boosts to stories that go un-updated for two long, which is how Pandora's Box finally got the upset.