Chapter 7
"Harry Potter" was not the first time Simon had heard the name.
Harry Potter had been splashed across newspaper headlines.
Harry Potter was part of recent history, the kind that got referenced in the first-year History of Magic textbook.
Harry Potter was the father of the first girl his own age with whom he'd had a proper conversation.
Harry Potter was a skinny, short boy with messy hair, clothes too big for him, and a strange scar on his forehead.
And most astonishing of all, Harry Potter had become the first person Simon met after travelling twenty-seven years into the past.
Yes. Fucking time travel.
"A friend of mine once told me I'd have the best chance of finding my closest friends right here on the Hogwarts Express," Simon said. "She even called it… a kind of ritual that carries its own magic."
"Really?" Harry's green eyes widened.
"She's from a proper magical family," Simon shrugged. "Unlike us. Practically Muggles."
It was oddly amusing to make a casual reference to an "ephemeral" person who was, in fact, the daughter of the boy sitting across from him. No, seriously—the feeling was incredibly strange.
But still… Muggle.
A peculiar word.
In short, it was the term for a person without magical ability. A non-wizard.
The etymology of "Muggle" came from the slang "mug," literally meaning "fool" or "gullible idiot."
A lot of people would probably understand where Simon's thoughts were heading.
The word "Muggle" carried an unmistakably negative connotation.
And its casual, everyday use among wizards already said a great deal. At the very least, it revealed a clear dividing line between "us" and "them."
Simon mentally turned the word over again, as though a different angle might change its meaning.
It didn't.
Muggle wasn't just a description.
It was a label.
A fact.
A verdict.
A diagnosis.
He couldn't help comparing it to similar practices throughout human history.
First came convenient shorthand, then everyday opposition. After that the word took on a life of its own, gradually accumulating extra meanings no one had officially intended—but everyone used anyway.
"Here we are—wizards! And they… they're just Muggles!"
A convenient binary system.
And a dangerous one.
The worst part wasn't even the word itself, but the tone in which it was usually said—casual, habitual condescension.
Exactly the kind of detail you had to notice when building a picture of the surrounding world. Seemingly trivial, but dig a little deeper and an ordinary label concealed a potential social landmine.
"Simon, are you from a normal family too?" Harry asked.
"Yeah. Liverpool," Simon shrugged. "Found out about the magical world this summer."
"Me too! Although… I think my parents were actually wizards."
If the reactions of people twenty-seven years in the future were anything to go by, Harry Potter was destined to become a living legend.
And this small, clearly underfed and under-resourced boy didn't match that image at all!
Was this really one of those "rags to riches" stories?
"Harry," Simon finally said. "Have you ever believed in time travel?"
"Time travel?" The boy blinked in confusion. "But that's… just science fiction, isn't it?"
"Same as magic?"
"Well… it would be cool. Like in Terminator or something?"
"Exactly!" Simon snapped his fingers. "Wait… the second one was supposed to come out this year, right? Have you seen it?"
"It just came out—in July," Harry said, giving him an odd look. "Yeah, I got lucky. Dudley nagged his parents nonstop. The film really is great!"
"Completely agree," Simon snorted. "The first two Terminator films—directed by James Cameron himself—are perfect examples of their genre. Even the physics mistakes are minimal. After that they just churned out slop."
"Was there more?"
The truth was, Simon was talking so strangely that Harry actually felt "out of the loop" for once. In other words, Simon was such an obvious freak that Harry felt like the normal one.
"Never mind," Simon waved it off. "So what makes Terminator 'correct'? It doesn't contradict itself! Skynet from the future sends a Terminator back to kill John Connor's mother. John Connor sends Kyle Reese in response—who becomes John Connor's father. The remnants of the battle are found by the government, which kick-starts the creation of Skynet, which triggers the war. See? Full circle."
"How…" Harry nodded with interest. "Like a loop?"
"Exactly," Simon agreed. "That loop even has a name: Novikov's self-consistency principle. It says that even if time travel happens, it has already become part of history—so changes are impossible. And do you know why this theory is so popular?"
"Because they made Terminator with it…?"
"Maybe," Simon said thoughtfully. "But probably not. The theory's strength is that it eliminates the main problem of ANY time travel—paradoxes."
"Logical inconsistencies?"
"Ever heard of the grandfather paradox?"
"Nope…"
"Let me give you the short version. Suppose I get a time machine. I go back and kill my grandfather. The moment Grandfather dies, I cease to exist—which means I never killed him."
"Grandfather comes back to life and you kill him again?"
"Exactly! Paradox! According to that, time travel is just fantasy. The whole point of any paradox is imagining a situation that contradicts itself. And time travel is riddled with paradoxes like the cheapest… er… you get it."
"So… time travel is impossible?"
"A couple of months ago I would have said it's impossible to turn a wooden baseball bat into a bouquet of roses with a ten-inch stick. Now…" Simon tiredly ruffled his hair. "Hard to say."
He needed to organise the available information.
Pierre Simon Laplace, born July seventh, two thousand and seven.
There was the first fucking inconsistency!
The date on the newspaper was crystal clear: first of September, nineteen ninety-one.
How the hell had he gone back twenty-seven years?
What was the last thing he remembered?
Simon had arrived at King's Cross. He'd boarded the train and met Lily Potter.
The train was attacked! People with guns and some kind of organised connection—even though electronics supposedly didn't work!
And…
They'd shot him in the head. He closed his eyes and felt a brief, searing pain inside his skull. The kind of sensation impossible to describe and impossible to forget.
By every law of common sense he should have died…
So why was he back in the past, talking to a boy who—in his present—was head of magical law enforcement?
Was this some kind of sign? A portent? Did it have something to do with Lily Potter? Why him, of all people?!
"Argh!" Simon groaned and pulled his wand from his pocket. "My clothes are the same! The wand in my hand is the same! And the letter in my pocket… Wait! The letter?!"
He quickly pulled out the detail he'd ignored in the initial shock.
HOGWARTS SCHOOL OF WITCHCRAFT AND WIZARDRY
Headmaster: Albus Dumbledore
(Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Sorcerer, Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot)
Dear Mr. Laplace,
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment.
Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July.
Yours sincerely,
Minerva McGonagall
Deputy Headmistress
"There it is!" His eyes lit up. "First inconsistency!"
He'd "fallen out" of the King's Cross wall without a trunk—he'd already checked on the other side. There had been so many problems he'd even dismissed the future lack of books, quills, and clothes.
He was wearing his own robes, holding his own wand, and—as it turned out—carrying a Hogwarts letter.
But his letter had been completely different!
First, he only knew this Albus whatever second-hand, and the Deputy Headmistress had been Minerva McGonagall!
In his time she was the Headmistress and Pomona Sprout was Deputy!
What the hell was going on?
He'd travelled through time with his own wand—but the letter in his pocket was addressed to him yet clearly not meant for this version of him!
One thing was travelling through time.
Something else entirely was travelling through time with signs that he hadn't travelled through time at all. But most importantly—the inconsistencies!
"And there's the second clue!" His eyes flashed again. "The address is blank!"
Last time the front of the letter had a printed address. Detailed enough to include the exact room!
"Er, Simon?" Harry called cautiously. "You okay?"
"Do you see this?"
"Blank address?"
"Yes—yes!" he nodded frantically. "What was written on yours?"
"Well… my address," Harry shrugged. "Right down to the… er… room."
"Exactly." Simon's eyes narrowed. "The house I live in might have been built later, so… something glitched."
This didn't look like a human error made during deliberate evidence tampering. Too obvious, too glaring.
Different parchment, different ink, handwriting mismatch, delivery method—all of those could be faked. But a blank address?
This looked more like a bug in the program code—one that produced noticeable, "impossible to miss" consequences.
Time travel was, in almost one hundred percent of cases, doomed to paradox.
But magic itself shattered common sense! It pulled energy from who-knew-where, redistributed it, and made everything work on its own!
Direct analysis couldn't uncover the rules—ordinary logic simply didn't apply.
"This feels more like crutches," Simon muttered. "Patches holding things together just because they have to hold."
A completely different problem: was he even enrolled as a Hogwarts student?
If there was a letter, he must be on the list, right? Wrong!
That cause-and-effect link was mostly wishful thinking. At any moment it could turn out that he was just some random eleven-year-old boy carrying a wand. That conclusion was based on the universal human hope of "maybe it'll work out."
But Simon didn't have any other options except to go with the flow. Although…
He could leave a few "hooks" for the future.
"We're in compartment eight, right?"
"Uh-huh…"
Under Harry's surprised gaze, Simon lay on the floor and aimed at the small end panel under the seat. With his fingernail he scratched the numbers: "3.141". They could only be seen if someone lay on the floor and looked exactly there.
He stood, brushed off his hands, and sat back down as though nothing suspicious had happened.
"What was that?"
"Forget it," Simon shrugged. "Just consider me naturally weird."
There was no point dragging Harry—his peer—into problems of this magnitude when Simon himself wasn't even sure they existed.
There was always the chance he'd simply lost his mind, right?
This wasn't Harry Potter—Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.
This was Harry Potter—eleven years old, knew less about the magical world than Simon did.
The minute of calm was finally broken by a polite knock at the door.
"Excuse me, boys—can I join you? Everywhere else is full."
A tall, gangly red-haired boy covered in freckles asked very courteously.
"Of course," Harry answered automatically—then remembered he wasn't alone. "Simon?"
"Come in," Simon shrugged.
"I'm Ron Weasley," the boy said, extending a hand that both Simon and Harry shook immediately. He quickly stowed his trunk on the overhead rack—from which Simon promptly scooted away—and looked at them. "And you?"
"Simon Laplace."
"Harry Potter."
"Harry Potter?! The Harry Potter?!" the boy shouted, then immediately clapped both hands over his mouth. "Sorry…"
"It's fine," Harry smiled awkwardly.
"Wait," Simon frowned. "You're already famous?"
"What do you mean 'already'…?"
"How long have you been famous? Since you were in nappies?!"
"Harry Potter defeated You-Know-Who when he was only one year old! Everyone knows him!"
"Seriously—since nappies!"
Simon frowned thoughtfully. He'd read about Voldemort, but not much. The first-year History of Magic curriculum hadn't gone into detail.
The idea that Harry had genuinely defeated a notorious terrorist—whose name people still feared to speak in the "present-future"—at one year old sounded, at minimum, implausible. But this was magic! They broke the laws of physics with every flick of a wand—what was defeating an arch-villain before learning to talk?
Yet Simon's doubts were fed by Harry's own reaction. The boy gave an awkward smile or a shrug. Clearly Harry either didn't know about it or had only recently found out. That reaction didn't match decades of fame. And it was obvious from looking at him that Harry—like Simon—was a complete novice in magic!
What an interesting figure this Harry Potter was! Practically the Chosen One! Famous in the future, famous now.
Of course Simon wanted to crack this nut and find out what had really happened—he was naturally curious—but even an idiot could see that persistent questioning right now might shatter the fragile new connection.
He didn't know what would fix everything, whether he'd ever get back, but if there were any signs, Harry Potter stood out brightest among them. Was this the convoluted hand of fate?
Was this invisible, omnipresent "Magic" the root cause of everything? Probably.
His thoughts were interrupted by the trolley witch stopping at their door. A plump elderly lady stood with a cart full of magical sweets.
"Anything off the trolley, dears?"
Simon blinked in confusion and looked more closely at her face.
It was the exact same saleswoman who'd sold sweets to him and Lily! Definitely the same one! And she looked practically unchanged!
"How old are you?" Simon asked on reflex.
"Oh-ho," the witch laughed lightly. "I'm still young! Just starting my nineteenth decade!"
"Uh-huh…" Simon nodded like a robot.
This granny had lived in the same era as Napoleon, for fuck's sake!
Even Ron and Harry gaped at the answer. And from Ron's reaction it was clear that even among wizards such an age was rare.
"So—anything?"
"Er…" Ron squirmed uncomfortably and pulled a crumpled sandwich from his pocket. "My… mum packed me this."
Both Simon and Harry could see the boy wanted something but couldn't afford it. And he was clearly embarrassed about his financial situation.
Simon had long since stopped caring about such things.
But Harry…
"We'll take the lot," he said, pulling a thick stack of Galleons from his pocket.
Judging by Ron's stunned expression, Harry was carrying a small fortune.
"Strange," Simon frowned. "The three of us look like absolute paupers, yet you've got a wad of banknotes in your pocket. Maybe I've got something too? Nope—all clear. Still poor as ever… OH FUCK—MY BRAND-NEW iPHONE!"
Simon had never paid attention to weird looks. Shame wasn't his thing.