Just as a notice to all of you who have read this fic and expressed concerns or asked questions (or those of you who have just stumbled upon this and will express concerns and and ask questions) about romantic pairings, I would like to take this moment to tell you all that this story is Gen, meaning that there will be no main pairings. At the age of eleven, it just seems unlikely for romance to blossom. As such, any romantic pairings will have to wait for a sequel in which the main characters are older. I hope you all enjoy the story! :)

Chapter One: The Discovery

Harry frowned at the lack of results his experimentation brought. It would probably look very cute to any adult passerby on his seven year old features. Harry would most certainly disagree, though; he wasn't cute! What he was, was very frustrated. He'd been experimenting for an entire week and so far had achieved nothing but more hypotheses and theories.

Most would agree that Harry was abnormally bright for a child his age, had he not been so talented at hiding it. In literature and history, Harry was easily years above his peers (in his own humble opinion, of course), but it was in science and maths that he truly soared.

It was not to say that he could solve equations at the speed of light nor could he memorize thousands of useful and useless scientific facts. Harry liked to think of himself as 'conceptually comprehensive', mainly because no other child in his primary school was likely to know either of those words.

In simpler terms, Harry had an unusual knack for understanding the concept of something and how it works and why it works. It just all seemed to fit so perfectly together and made sense, which was more than he could say for any people. Naturally, this gave him a desire to learn more and more about how the world ticked. Humans are, after all, uncannily curious creatures.

It was this desire to learn more about the world that had led Harry to his current experiment, and the frustration it brought. While many things could be said about Harry Potter, that he was stupid or prone to ignore the obvious was not among them. Indeed, while many people reject and dismiss anything that was too 'ridiculous' to fit into their reality, Harry was of the firm belief that reality was only truly limited by the perception and understanding of the one who lived in it. After all, could anyone truly say that something was absolutely impossible? Perhaps it was a childish notion, but Harry figured he was allowed some leeway at the age of seven.

It was a combination of these beliefs and his natural shrewdness that caused Harry to notice a very interesting pattern. Throughout his life, Harry could recall several events which would defy the laws of science and rationality that were accepted as common knowledge among the masses. the occurrences ranged from randomly turning his teacher's wig blue to suddenly appearing atop the roof of his school.

Ordinarily, even Harry would have come up with a separate and sensible explanation for each one of those events, were it not for the fact that they all held two very significant things in common. Firstly, he had never once heard of events similar happening to any other person besides himself, though that alone could he mere coincidence.

The theory of coincidence became much more unlikely when one considered the next thing: the events had always occurred such that the end result would be to his benefit, at least in the short term. This was true of every single one of them without exception. It was as if the occurrences had transpired solely as a result of, and in order to accomplish, his innate desires.

Thinking about all of this for several days had brought Harry to one final conclusion: somehow, he was causing things to happen that violated the widely accepted laws of reality. Until it was disproven, this was the theory he would stick with.

One thing that every science textbook he'd ever read agreed on was that the best way to go about investigating phenomena was through a process called 'The Scientific Method'. Fortunately, it was a rather simple procedure.

Firstly, from observation and inference, one had to draw a hypothesis. This step had already been completed. Well, no, he didn't have a hypothesis, Harry had supposed, but a theory. A hypothesis was more specifically a prediction that would contain the words 'if' and 'then'.

Once his hypothesis was formed, he would have to test it with an experiment. If the resulting data was positive, then it would help to form his next hypothesis. If the resulting data was negative, then it would also help to form his next hypothesis. Either way, he could only gain from it.

That had been his thoughts a week ago, but now Harry was beginning to have doubts. After all of that time spent repeating the cycle of hypothesize, test, re-hypothesize, he had yet to achieve even a single positive result! Harry wondered if perhaps this was how all scientists felt when they kept failing to prove their theories, despite just knowing that they were right.

Were he more well-learned in the scientific method than he was (which, for a seven-year-old, was just asking for the impossible), he would recognize that he was very heavily biased in his experimentation. After all, if he managed to pull this off, it would allow for him to potentially manipulate the universe at his whim. What kind of seven-year-old wouldn't want to be able to violate the laws of reality on command? Fortunately for Harry, though, he was indeed correct in his theory.

This made itself known when Harry was just about to capitulate that he was wrong and just give up on the exciting idea. His frustration at his failure, anger at what his failure meant, and embarrassment at how he ever could have believed otherwise mixed together into a large spike of negative emotion. There was nothing to even be observed! It was all so useless! Such things were completely impossible, anyways!

Harry froze as a sudden breeze seemed to whisper to him the words he had practically chanted to himself like an eternal mantra. Nothing is impossible. Then Harry screwed his eyes tightly shut as he felt them sting painfully.

"Stupid random breeze and its stupid dust." Harry muttered as he rubbed his eyes and the pain faded quickly. When he finally opened them, he nearly jumped in shock and bewilderment.

He was surrounded by a cacophony of strange vibrant colors where he was certain there ought not to be any. Upon closer observation, it was revealed that not only were they vibrant but literally emitted their own soft glow. They were not merely randomly floating in the air either, but rather seemed attached to physical objects in some kind of system of lines.

The trees had silvery networks of misty threads and various objects around him also has their own colors, though some looked completely normal. What really three him for a loop was when he realized that he could actually see the strange glowing lines straight through solid objects.

It was almost like a kind of X-ray vision- he could determine the outline of objects he couldn't see simply by analyzing the luminescent strands attached to them (so long as they had strands, that was). If they were present in the trees, did that mean they could be in other living organisms too? Harry whirled around, eager to find out.

There was a system of glowing lines in himself too. Unlike, the children around him, which he found just held dull gray glows in them, he possessed a dazzling myriad of colors. There were reds, greens, blues, purples, yellows, and oranges in all different shades and intensities. There also appeared to be more threads in him than there were in the tree or the other children. He could hardly count all of them, but if he had to estimate, he'd put it at somewhere around ten thousand.

For the life of him, Harry just couldn't figure out what had happened to him. He had felt some pain in his eyes and when he'd opened them, he'd been greeted with strange glowing lines. Harry spent the rest of the day unfocused and hazy, trying to puzzle out just what had happened.

He wasn't foolish enough to alert a teacher. They'd never believed him when he told the truth about things that were reasonably normal, like that his cousin often targeted him in a game called 'Harry Hunting'. As if they'd believe him if he told them he was seeing weird lights!

It finally hit him while he was walking home, and he nearly slapped himself when be realized how obvious it was. Of course, this was simply another one of those odd events! Sure, it was more drastic an effect than all the previous ones had ever had, but it made a lot more sense than anything else he could think up. These effects always worked to his desire, though, so just what was it he was seeing?

Thinking back, he tried to recall exactly what had happened leading up to his strange ability to see these luminescent threads. He had been feeling very agitated at his continued failure in experimenting when his eyes had stung, so he naturally closed them. Upon opening his eyes, the new ability had been present and clear. Was it possible that the stinging in his eyes was actually due to the development of this bizarre visual function instead of just some dust getting blown into his eyes?

One week later, the most probable theory Harry devise was that he was seeing some form of energy wave normally invisible to the human eyes. After all, there were wavelengths that went both above and below the visible light spectrum. This could simply be right next to it and scientists just didn't have a way to detect it yet.

For now, Harry was content to observe all he could and record his findings in his six hundred paged school notebook (one that was supposed to last him through school for the next few years but that he never truly had to use). After he had collected more information, then he would begin to make some inferences. But at this stage, it would be like trying to understand how an electric circuit works without knowing what electricity was.

One thing that really called Harry's attention was the amount of strange energy in the residence of Mrs. Figg, a nice (if somewhat strange) old lady that he sometimes stayed with while the rest of his family was out. He hadn't had the chance to get inside since he'd acquired his new sight, but he could still see enough to know that it was unusual.

For one thing, it looked like there was some kind of barrier surrounding the entire property made up of blue crisscrossing threads the spread out in the shape of a dome. Incidentally, a similar, if much more complex, structure of threads also surrounded his own home at Number Four, Privet Drive. When Harry drew a model of the patterns in his notebook to use as a reference after hours of painstaking detail, something new and interesting happened.

A translucent and slightly luminescent square appeared above his the picture on his notebook. It was like some kind of holographic computer screen from a science fiction movie. It was filled with curious symbols and characters that he didn't understand mixed in with some normal English words and numbers. Even still, everything on it was completely indecipherable to him, even if he could recognize and understand the English words by themselves. It didn't seem to follow the same grammar style he was used to.

Hesitantly, Harry reached out a hand to touch the ethereal projection. When his finger brushed against the surface of it, something resembling a computer keyboard slid out of the bottom of the screen, equally pellucid. The keys on it looked just like those normally found on a regular keyboard except that there were more keys with strange symbols that Harry didn't recognize from anywhere but easily visible in the screen in front of him.

Harry, feeling slightly more confident now, tapped his finger on the 'A' key. An 'a' appeared at the end of the last line of nonsense-script, but that entire line and a couple others became underlined in red. Then Harry noticed that some of the lines he drew in his notebook were gone. Looking back at Mrs. Figg's house, he discovered that those very same threads were missing from the actual barrier. He quickly hit the backspace and the lines were restored.

Wondering what could happen if someone found him next to this weird screen, he copied down all of the strange symbols on a new page in his notebook and tried to figure out a way to turn the mysterious projection off. Hopefully, he would be able to bring it out again.

After a couple minutes of trying different approaches, Harry hit the esc. key. The screen and keyboard blinked out of existence, leaving behind no evidence that it had been there just moments before. Certainly, this was very strange. But that just meant it was a new learning opportunity!

/-/-/-/-/-/-/

Another couple of months passed by and Harry had been able to open up the strange computer-thing many more times. It was a simple process, once he'd figured out how to do so. He'd actually come to two different methods.

One way of bringing up the projection was to draw a replica of preexisting threads in the world and focus on them. This would cause the screen to pop up with some text in that strange half runic and half English language already written within. However, it was necessary to make sure that every line of the drawing was an exact copy of the pattern of strange glowing threads. If it was even minutely off, then most of the text would be outlined in red.

Another way was for him to draw a plain circle, line, or other simple shape and focus hard on making the screen come. When he did this, the screen would show up with no text in it. When he typed in that blank screen it created new threads. However, when he did something that caused his lines to become underlined in red, the threads disappeared.

Harry's greatest breakthrough yet was in creating something applicable. By copying some things from prewritten texts and reverse engineering the way each component interacted with each other, Harry was able to create a series of text that wasn't a copy of something else and had no red underlines. It wasn't a particularly large piece of text, but Harry wasn't too concerned with that. He was much more excited by the fact that he'd created a new system of threads and had absolutely no idea what it did.

He spent several hours in the week trying to do something with the new thread system, but he couldn't touch them- his hand just passed through them like a ghost. It was on Saturday, when he was weeding the garden (or at least he was supposed to be), that he finally sparked a reaction from the threads. Apparently, though he couldn't touch them directly, they moved wherever he directed them with his mind, even if he didn't realize that he was actually directing them.

When he'd instinctually twisted the threads in a specific manner, a large shockwave of pure kinetic force burst out from the threads, forcing the grass of the lawn to point outwards and eventually cracking the sidewalk at the end of the property. Harry nearly jumped out of his skin when it happened. Beyond the surprise of the unexpected result, he'd also felt as if some energy had left him.

The next day, Harry tried the same thing (making sure that he was once again outside somas to not blow up his current residence), and once again the shockwave blasted out, rippling the grass and this time reaching the road and cracking it. He couldn't help the triumphant grin that settled on his visage.

Several times over the next month, he used some copying and reconstructing with the strange not-computer to create various different effects. He called each system of lines and the subsequent system of threads that mirrored it a 'spell', in an amused fit of spite against his normality-obsessed relatives. To further that spite, he referred to his entire ability to see and manipulate the threads 'magic', the forbidden word of his family.

Now, after a month of copying script and making spells, he felt that he had enough of an idea what the function many components served to create his own spell completely from scratch. It would he his first completely original spell, one that he'd be able to choose the effect of instead of being surprised every time he tried a new one out.

A pattern that Harry had noticed was that in any given 'sentence' of the script, though Harry figured it was really more of an equation, one side required that he use the same specific white rune. However, it could have a coefficient to increase the amount of it.

The greater the coefficient, the greater the effect. Harry was fairly certain that this white rune represented energy, which was necessary to power any spell. He started out by just using a reddish orange rune to fill the other side of the equation. It looked something like this:

RedRune=EnergyRune

Unfortunately, this was underlined in red, so it wouldn't work. Harry tried adding coefficients to the EnergyRune as he had seen before. The red line disappeared once he used five as the coefficient. Apparently, one RedRune required five EnergyRunes to be sufficiently powered.

Harry smiled and closed the window before activating his spell with a mental twist of the threads. As the spell activated, a tiny flame lit up in Harry's open palm, like a candle but didn't burn him in the slightest. Harry watched in slight awe, even having seen the effects of more potent spells before. This was his very first original spell. The RedRune must have been representative of fire. He made a mental note to start calling it a FireRune.

Harry deactivated his spell and spent some time meddling with his work. He was able to create water, earth, and wind as well. Combining a FireRune and a WaterRune seemed to cause no effect even though it showed no red line for error. Combining an EarthRune and a WindRune did much the same.

However combining a FireRune and a Wind Rune made an orange ball of light that would burn through things much faster than even the fire could. Experimentation showed that it also could melt some kinds of stone. A WaterRune and an EarthRune made nothing but mud, unfortunately. A FireRune and an EarthRune could make a flaming stone appear (which very nearly burned his hand). A WaterRune and an AirRune made fog, something that he supposed could be useful as a smokescreen should he ever need it.

When Harry added two compatible runes together, they would form a single new rune that was different from all the others. The new rune would then appear on his 'keyboard', allowing him to use it directly. Soon, though Harry didn't know it yet, he would be combining combinations of combinations together to form more specific aspects.

His experimenting didn't end there, though. Harry made a drastically significant discovery at the library. The 'grammar' structure of the strange script showed a format very similar to that used in computer programming. So, of course, Harry learned absolutely everything he could about the topic with vigor. Unfortunately there was only so much one could gleaned about computer programming from a school library. Still, he found that it gave him a much better understanding of how the script in his spells worked. He came to call the process of writing the script 'Magic Programming'.

It was then that Harry decided. I am Harry Potter, the Magic Programmer.