"An Annoyingly Meta Story"

[joshuazelinsky]

 

The following occurs now, in a world nearly our own: 

To set the stage, our major characters are Adam,  Peter, Leah, and Sam. They are older teenagers who go to a magic school much like many you have heard of or read about. However, this magic school has at least one important difference from many others you have read about: electronics work fine in a magic setting, because why wouldn’t they? 

Recently the four of them had been caught up in various mysterious thaumaturgical events, as people at such schools are wont to do. As a result, they’ve been trying to find a copy of an old magical tome, “The True Key,” but have been unable to locate it.  The Library at one point had a copy, but they were unable to find it, and found no record of it being checked out at any point in the past or having been de-acquisitioned.

Sam has always been the most dedicated and academic one of them, and so she has continued the search as the others have turned to other pursuits for the moment. In particular, Adam and Leah found out that Peter, who with his dark hair and glasses, despite having a passing resemblance to Harry Potter, had never actually read the Harry Potter books, or seen the movies, possibly in part due to what Adam and Leah insisted was his “non-Muggle background.” Rather than get much  work done in the evening, the two have forced him to watch the movies the last few days. 

We open in  Adam’s dorm room, with Adam, Peter and Leah on the couch, watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Harry and Ron are on screen, having a conversation. Then Ron and Harry turn towards the camera with Harry  frowning and saying, “Hello, I’m… not sure what this means, but I'm supposed to tell you that none of you are picking up your phones, and your version of Hermione has been waiting downstairs for the last fifteen minutes for one of you to let her in.” 

“Do they mean Sam?” asked Peter. 

“I think so,” said Leah. “She must be modifying the TV somehow. I’ll go let her in.” Adam hit the mute button on the TV, as Sam entered,  carrying her bookbag. 

“Took you long enough. I’ve found something,” said Sam as she took out her laptop. Its back was covered in stickers including one that said “Girls Code,” and another which said “Don’t Mess with Witches. We'll Turn You Into a Newt and You Won’t Get Better.”  One sticker had slightly glowing glyphs which hurt to look at too long.

“So, let me set the groundwork,” began Sam.  “I was taking a break by organizing my  book collection, and I decided to use the default spellware that the school library uses.”

“Oh, of course,” said Adam. “We all have personal libraries large enough for that. What else does one use extra-dimensional space for?”

Sam ignored the sarcasm and opened up her laptop “When I got to my fiction, I made what may have been an error. Whoever made the software end was really good at having it talk to the spells, but was a lousy interface designer. I already had cataloged most of the later books, and when I went to tell the system to treat the prequel novelizations as books that went in the series before A New Hope, I accidentally told the spell to treat all three as a single book.  Well, the spell insisted on really doing so.” Sam held up a large book which had a cover on it that said “Star Wars: Episodes I to III.”   

Leah ran her hand through her blond hair. “You think someone hid the book by telling the School Library spells to treat it as part of a second book?”

“Or possibly accidentally did” said Sam. “I asked myself, if you were to hide a book that way but didn’t want it lost or disposed of, where would you put it? Or if it were accidental, what accident would make it most likely to not get noticed?”

“Attached to a boring book that no one is ever going to check out?” asked Adam?

“But, that would risk its removal,” said Peter. “My work-study is in the library. We de-acquisition books that haven’t been checked out for a long time, unless it's a standard textbook.”

“Exactly my thought process,“ said Sam. “So I was going to go through all the copies of the standard textbooks at the library. But if someone had misplaced one of their own, they might check out a library copy. And the library has a lot of copies of some textbooks, so instead I asked which textbooks would be least likely to be checked out?”

 “Something really boring?” asked Adam.

“You’re really channeling Ron a bit too much there,” said Sam, as she gestured to the TV, where Harry, and Ron on screen had apparently been joined by Hermione, and all  we’re all quietly looking out through  the TV and clearly listening to their conversation. “But essentially yes. We have multiple textbooks which are required officially for classes for various reasons involving accreditation and classes being transferable to other schools, but aren’t almost ever used. So every student buys a copy, and they’ll almost never check them out of the library since they never actually need the book. I found this:” Sam took out of her bag a book titled “The History of Non-Aligned Summoning in the High Middle Ages.” “Standard fifth year summoning textbook, but when you open it,” she opened the book and flipped towards the end. After Appendix A,  “Goetic Spirit Translations,” and Appendix B, “Corrected Spirit Seals,”  there was Appendix C, "The True Key” in very tiny letters. 

Peter said, “I wonder if they deliberately used a large book on the same topic to minimize the chance that the title of the book would be substantially altered.”

“That hadn’t occurred to me,” said Sam, “but that suggests that’s further evidence that this was a deliberate attempt to hide the book without removing it from the system.”

“Uh, guys,” said Leah, pointing at the TV. Hermione was apparently waving her hand and trying to get their attention.  Adam unmuted the TV.

“It is fascinating to see parallel universe versions of us,” said Hermione.  “and somehow computers work near magic in your world, but it sounds like you have a pretty serious issue. Can you figure out who told your school’s library to treat both books as one?”

“I should be able to do that. They give work-study students way more access than we need by default,” said Peter. He closed his eyes.

“They give you a direct mental interface?” Sam asked jealously. 

“Yeah,” said Peter, his eyes still closed. “As you said, the software interface sucks.” He concentrated briefly, and then opened his eyes.

“The logs say it was Professor Pims.”

“But Pims told us he had never read or seen the book,” said Adam.

“Have you found Voldemort’s spy?” asked Harry from the TV.

“Alright, that’s enough of that. Thank you very much,” said Adam, hitting the power-off button on the TV remote.  “Whew, they were getting a bit creepy. How did you do that anyways? Sentience is super-powerful magic. ”

“Oh,” said Sam. “No true sentience,” she grimaced. “That would be a lot creepier, and not really ethical. I could only disrupt the narrative flow with my spell so much without it crashing. So I tied a magical overlay on the  film into FreeLLM.  It's an open-source competitor of GPT4 with similar plugins.  It has a lot less human-reinforcement learning so it is a bit more broad with what you can do with it, but sometimes behaves a bit squirrely.  I knew you were watching Harry Potter, and I figured since FreeLLM had been trained on a lot of fanfic, it would keep the characters roughly in character, preserving narrative aspects for the spell. It insisted on seeing us as parallel universe copies, presumably due in part to some fanfic conventions, although maybe if we had pushed it would have decided we were in a crossover story of some sort.”

 “Well, in that case you’re lucky we were only up to the third movie when you did this,” said Leah.

“What do you mean?” asked Sam.

“Well, in the later books Ron and Hermione end up as an item. How do you think a non-PG fanfic Ron would react to finding out there are two Hermiones?”