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Palimpsest

Prologue: Chapter 1

By Larry Huss

"So," Hermione Jean Granger thought, "There is a Higgs Boson. The Cosmological Constant is calculable, and the Arrow of Time points both ways. Just one way is a major trunk line, and the other is a neglected animal track in a marsh. "

She looked down for her last time onto the Earth. Down to where two hundred years and a bit ago there had been Ireland and Britain and something called North West Europe. The vast sheet of the Britannic Sea glittered pure blue, and she cursed again the 'Greater Good.'

He'd probably been right, though, old Dumbledore, right there at the end. Destroying that little corner of the globe, and its theoretically immortal Dread Emperor, was probably a good idea by then. The billion or so who died, from the meteor showers, the tsunamis, the cracking of the Aswan High Dam, the Ring of Fire going off in stages; they were probably worth it to get rid of Tom Riddle and his Horcrux anchors to immortality. Not a very elegant bit of wizardry, though.

She had been in Australia, checking up in secret on her memory-altered parents when wounded Tom (Harry had come so close to taking him down the year before) Riddle had made his move, and perverted some of the more dicey Aztec rituals. So instead of mass human sacrifice preserving the order of the Universe, and keeping the doors between the dead and living closed; the gates of Hell were opened, and the things the Dementors had run from so long ago showed up.

At the end, that night, Albus' Patronus had shown up to let her know that she was the last of the Order of the Phoenix, and that the Heavens would cleanse the Earth. She had only figured out what he meant when the fiery streaks began to crowd the sky, and the reports of the massive ground strikes were being announced on the news programs.

It had worked. For the last few centuries not a squeak had been heard from Lord Voldemort, the undead, or any things that could be called demons. And the fishing was undisturbed and rich in the reaches of the Britannic Sea.

She'd spent the next decade as stoned as a talented Potions Mistress could possibly arrange. A day that she could remember who she really was was a day in pain. Survivor's guilt didn't even begin to cover it.

She eventually gave up trying to 'accidently' kill herself with an overdose, and worked on becoming filthy rich. If you were going to be miserable, you might as well be comfortable about it. And there were things that a talented and wealthy witch could do that eased her conscience, a bit. Still, in time, the excesses of her misspent youth started catching up to her in her sixties, and she used part of her wealth to buy a residential medical clinic on the Moon, and went there to live in the low-stress, low gravity, and the endlessly purified air. Owning the clinic allowed her to play with the records; no one noticed if a name stayed resident for an unusually long time, or if some magically disguised person with a different name did much the same.

Of course she'd thought "What if we'd done…" At one point she'd even funded a think tank devoted to 'Hypothetical Scenarios' that spent the twenty years of its geekish existence working on situations and remedies. The major failure point always came down to information. There had been too little, shared too late. But since even Time Tuners only let you go back four hours or so there was little that she could see that could have been done. Even those useless toys, the ones that had been turned in after the Battle in the Ministry had claimed the majority of the instruments, had gone up when London had become a ball of glowing plasma.

Now she knew better, though at first she hadn't seen how she was any better off. Even if you could go back in time the Solar System wasn't where it had been then, and it would take another century (one she didn't have) to develop the technology to travel to the proper location. The energy cost to send even a few photons back was incredible. How would you aim and calibrate the temporal insertion? All problems that would stump any scientific team. Well, that meant science was out. So she had decided to do the work herself. It had taken two of the last few years she could have.

She developed her Mission Objectives; two were enough:

Riddle had to go.

Damage limited to less than 1 (one) thousand people. Preferably Death Eaters.

Finance: Everything she had accumulated in two centuries of energetic effort, enough to pay for energy connections and a private "meditation site" away from other inhabited domes, so when the show got going the rest of the city of Mare Celestis wouldn't be choking in the dark when every piece of electronic life support equipment in it blew up at once.

Method: High-Energy powered temporal information transfer. Matter would have required too much of everything to work. Only information, the arrangement of already existing things, could be used.

Guidance system: Hermione Jean Granger, witch. Things once in contact remain with a tenuous relationship to each other (quantum entanglement being just one example) Hermione reasoned that things that are each other will maintain a far more certain grip. Hermione Jean Granger still had, after all these years, a few teeth in her skull, a few sections of bone that had never been altered, replaced, or regrown since she was a child. They were the limiting factor on how far back she could target, and the oldest of them was at the limit of her possible control.

Payload: Arithmancy dictated that with the available resources no more than her Numerological Equivalent could be sent. Thankfully not in compressed format. That meant that 184 characters, signs, spaces, line drops, and the like were the limit. How to arrange them… things would start to change as soon as the short message arrived. Say too much, and half the effort would be wasted on things that would have been made impossible by previous actions. Say things too verbosely and very little useful information could be sent. Say them too tersely, and the information would be incomprehensible. How bright had she really been, as a child? And how good at solving things?

For three weeks she worked out the format, the contractions, the minimum separations needed. Even at the end she realized she was abandoning the task, not really completing it. The balance between compression and clarity would certainly be wrong, but even the use of a Pensieve to check her memories couldn't give her an un-ambiguous idea on exactly how to put things. At the last she wished she had had the capacity to add "questionauthority" at the end. But perfection was for the gods, and she was only a witch.

Fuse: A thought, wrapped in a compulsion spell.

Target: The brain of Hermione Jean Granger, age 10, on the day she sat before the office computer at her parents surgery, and had one of those "spells" she sometimes had, that made her feel so odd: June 23rd, 1990.

On August 6th, 2211, she went to the All-Faiths Chapel at the clinic, and locked the door behind her. She knew that not all that many religions looked kindly at witches or wizards, and had installed the place for the comfort of her clients, not her own beliefs. As she was going, very soon, to essentially commit suicide she felt that she was probably on even thinner theological ice than usual. Still, it never hurt to cover as many bets as you can.

"Great Whomever, please help me, or at least stay out of the way. It's for all those who had their lives stolen or ruined, and all those who never got to be. I know I won't actually alter the past, just make a new one that has a chance to defeat Voldemort. The military experts have said that absent an early change in things, it's unlikely we can beat him. So, in most cases, unless I jump the gun, he wins. I just want to save some people by evening out the score. There's no way I'll ever know the difference, if there is one, but please give them a chance."

Ω

The Lord of Things Out of Their Time was interested, and amused. He sent a thought.

"Smoking Mirror, Riddle so made you look bad. Just thought you should know."

Perhaps Tezcatlipoca, the god of sacrifice heard.

Ω

She left the chapel, and took a sealed vehicle to the small radius dome with the great big power lines that was her 'meditation site' and clicked on the taxi's auto-return program so that it went back to the rental agency she'd gotten it from. They'd always played fair with her, after all.

At 16.15, local time, Hermione Jean Granger, age 221, stepped into the runic array inscribed in the floor, used a spell to flip a switch to allow far too much power to surge into some silvery artifacts, and was instantly incinerated.

Ω

At 3:17 GMT, on June 23rd, 1990, Hermione Jean Granger, age 10, was puttering around with her parents' business computer, and didn't have a particular wild sudden surge of accidental magic, and burn out its motherboard. She had a different one, instead. A new infinity of probabilities were born.