FicWad

-I-I-I-

When the pain stopped Harry was left standing on an empty plane of light. Looking around in confusion, he hissed in surprise as a voice spoke from behind him, twirling around to see Trinity sitting on a ratty old couch that he could have sworn wasn't there before.

"This is what we call a 'loading program'. Here, anything is possible. We can make anything, do anything, we can possibly imagine." She patted the couch next to her, inviting him to sit down.

"I don't understand." He settled gingerly onto the cushion. "Where are we?"

She sighed, rubbing her temples. "How the hell does Morpheus manage this..." she muttered, before turning to the boy. "We're... inside a computer."

Harry took a moment to let that sink in. "A... computer? Like the one Dudley got for his birthday?"

Trinity smiled. "A bit more sophisticated, but yes, basically the same."

"Oh." He bit his lip. "Er, I don't know much about computers, but..."

"Isn't that impossible?" she finished, and he nodded. "In the world you know, it would be, but...that world isn't real. It's a computer-generated dreamworld, called the Matrix."

Harry sat there, stunned. "A dream? But... you can't get hurt in dreams..." His hand drifted up to cover the fading bruise on his cheek, and wide eyes turned towards Trinity, filled with a silent question.

She sighed again. "Harry, have you ever heard the saying 'mind over matter'?" He nodded. "Do you know what it means?"

The young boy shook his head, and she thought for a moment. "It's... the mind is a very powerful thing, Harry, so powerful that we still don't understand everything it does, or can do. But one of the things we have learned is that, if you believe in something strong enough, then your mind makes it real. You believed that bruise would be there, so it is."

Harry frowned, struggling with the concept. "So, if I believed it wasn't there, it'd go away?"

The woman smiled. "Theoretically, yes, but no one's been able to fool their own minds like that yet." She looked at him thoughtfully. "Who knows? Maybe you'll be the first."

He ignored that last statement, opting to concentrate on his next question. "If... if I was dreaming, then... you woke me up?" he asked uncertainly, frowning when she nodded. "But why was I asleep?"

Trinity winced. This was the part she'd been dreading. Suppressing yet another sigh, she tried to think of a way to explain ancient wrongs to an innocent child. "Well... do you know what 'artificial intelligence' is?" She wasn't surprised when he answered in the negative. "AI is what happens when a computer becomes... smart, like a person is smart. Anyway, we're not really sure, but we think that about two hundred years ago, we created a computer like that. And... the computer decided it didn't really like us all that much. So, it started killing us off."

The boy gasped. "But... why would it do that?"

She shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe it just found out about all the wars we had and thought we were a threat." Trinity snorted. "We probably were, back then; we sure aren't now." Shaking her head to clear her thoughts, she continued.

"There was a fairly short, desperate war, between us humans and the armies of machines that single intelligence created. At the very last, we were about to lose, when some genius realized the machines depended on the sun to for energy, and came up with a way to block out that power source. So, we blacked out the skies."

She smiled sadly at the puzzled expression on Harry's face. "This is part of what I meant, when I said you really wouldn't understand until I showed you." Putting an arm around Harry, she waved a hand, and the empty plane vanished.

Harry squeaked as they were suddenly floating above a blasted, barren wasteland, empty of life as far as his eyes could see. Eyes wide in horror, he clung to Trinity, who wrapped her arms tightly about his trembling form. Then, a colossal sound, like a thousand cannons being fired at once made him look up, and he cried out.

Above them, the sky roiled sickeningly, caught in a never-ending storm of gargantuan proportions. Thunder /roared/, and lightning flared, lighting up the clouds until it grew to be too much for his weakened eyes to take, and he buried his face into his protector's shoulder as tears rolled down his cheeks.

"Make it... make it /stop/," he pleaded, unable to even hear himself over the storm. Yet, a moment later there was silence, and Trinity was rocking him back and forth soothingly.

"Hush... hush, it's over. It's all right..." As she felt the tremors subside, she slowly pulled away. Seeing the tears still trailing down his face, she winced. "I'm sorry, Harry. If I'd realized it would affect you like that..."

Frowning in concern when there was no answer, she put a finger under his chin and lifted it gently. "Harry?"

He sniffed. "How... how could they do that to the /sky/?" he asked, horror filling his voice.

"They were desperate men, Harry. It was the only way they could see to win."

"B-but... it didn't work, did it?"

Trinity was silent for a moment. "No, it didn't. The machines found...another power source. That's why the Matrix exists."

Curious despite himself, he couldn't help but ask. "What do they use now?"

"Us."

-I-I-I-

Morpheus watched the silent figure of his newest recruit, lying limp and pale in his chair. The serious man winced when tears began to trickle from his eyes, and he wished the child had never had to go through this, never had to lose his innocence in the face of humanity's old mistakes. But, it was necessary.

There was no going back.

A hand touched his shoulder, and he turned. "Are you ready, sir?" Tank asked. The captain nodded, settling himself into one of the remaining chairs.

Briefly, he pitied Trinity, who had to guide her charge through the greatest changes his life would ever take. This time, he was the one with the painless task.

All he had to do was see what interest, if any, Harry's disappearance had stirred up in the Matrix.

-I-I-I-

"W-what do you mean, us?" Harry asked, taken aback.

"You see, every living animal produces electricity; the more complex that animal is, the more it makes. And humans are the most highly evolved on this planet. Once the machines found a way to harness that electricity, they had all the power they would ever need." She looked out over the empty plane, bitterness clouding her features. "We are /grown/, Harry, grown like fields of wheat for them to consume."

"But... why the Matrix?"

Trinity smiled, softly, sadly. "The greatest gifts we possess are our minds. So, they found a way to control those, too."

Suddenly weary, the nine-year-old curled up into a ball, wrapping his arms around his knees as he leaned against the woman. "Trinity? Do you think we could go home now? I don't want to know any more today."

She laughed, a sad, quiet little laugh. "Of course, Harry." Glancing upwards, she called out. "Tank! We're ready to end the program."

-I-I-I-

Tank carefully eased the jack out of Harry's skull, watching closely until the boy's eyes fluttered open. "You all right there, Harry?"

It was a second before he nodded uncertainly, and the operator helped him up. Beside them, Neo did the same for his wife.

"Tank?" Trinity requested. "Do you think you could take Harry back to his room? I'm going to wait for Morpheus to check in, see what he found out."

He nodded and took the still rather dazed child's hand, gently tugging him off the chair and out of the room. A couple of silence-filled minutes later, they reached Harry's new home.

"Alright, Harry. I want you to get some sleep, okay? You've got a big day tomorrow." Tank smiled as the kid gave him a sleepy yawn and lay down on the bed, where he was asleep almost before his head touched the pillow. Suppressing a chuckle, he pulled the blanket up until it covered the frail body, and stepped out of the cubicle.

"Que duermos bien, Harry."

Dream of good things, for waking is so very much harder...

-I-I-I-

Severus Snape was scowling.

Not that that was anything unusual, given that he was almost always scowling- except for those times when he was smirking maliciously, of course. But what was unusual was that the person he was scowling at was a muggle.

A muggle he was currently holding at wand point.

"I know your husband is dead, you fool woman! I want to know where your nephew is!" he bellowed, fed up with the woman's hysterics, which she'd launched in to the moment she opened the door. After only a minute of the tears and babbling, he'd been unable to resist pulling his wand.

Suppressing a sigh of relief when she immediately shut up, he glared at her. "Now, you are Petunia Dursley, correct?"

The horse-like woman stared at him, wide-eyed. "Y-you... you're one of those /freaks/." The last word was spat out with such venom the Slytherin briefly wondered whether there might be a snake somewhere in her ancestry.

"I beg your pardon-" he began, incensed, before she cut him off.

"Look, I don't care what you people want, so you can just turn around and leave before someone sees you," she hissed, and tried to slam the door in his face.

Pale with fury, Severus pushed open the door and stormed inside. "I think not. I was sent by Headmaster Dumbledore to check on the boy, and will not leave until I have done so!"

He was shocked when she laughed hysterically. "You want to see the boy? I wish you luck, then! The useless brat disappeared the same day my poor Vernon was murdered. And good riddance!"

The Potions Master was left speechless- quite a comical sight, actually, and one that would have shocked his coworkers. After all, the greasy-haired man always had a snarky comment ready for any situation.

But apparently he didn't have one for when the hope of the wizarding world vanished into thin air.

Then, as a question struck his mind, Severus turned to the smirking woman. "You're telling me, that the boy you were supposed to protect has been missing for /two days/, and you haven't reported it." His voice was calm, calm almost to the point of frigidity, which in itself should have warned his victim.

Unfortunately, the... female/, he hesitated to call her a woman, seemed to lack a survival instinct as well as familial loyalties as she snorted. "If I reported him and they found the brat, they'd bring him back here. And I have had /enough of that... abnormality ruining our lives. Ungrateful for everything we gave him, and always doing freakish things-"

"/Silencio/."

Albus would undoubtedly get on his case for hexing a muggle, but the ex-Death Eater had heard enough. He supposed it was possible that the Potter boy was as much of a poor excuse for a human being as his aunt seemed to believe- his father's example as a case in point- but looking around, seeing the cold house, and the family pictures on the wall that displayed a distinct lack of a lightning-bolt scar...

Somehow, he doubted it.

Thoughts running furiously through his mind, Severus stalked out of the house and around the back, out of the sight of muggles, before he disapperated back to Hogsmead. Conveniently forgetting to take the spell off the muggle, of course.

No, the Headmaster would not be happy with this latest turn of events.

-I-I-I-

Morpheus frowned in concentration from where he'd been beneath the window as he watched the man wearing a black... dress? ...walk out the door of Harry's house. Carefully, he tried to follow him as he marched around to the house's rear, and nearly growled in frustration as he found the man had already vanished.

Who was he, and why was he so interested in the child? According to the district records the family wasn't all that wealthy, merely well-to-do, and none were related to anyone important. The only oddity had been the scarcity of information about Harry's parents, the files merely stating that they were deceased.

Well, whoever he was, he didn't seem to intend to harm Harry, nor did this 'Dumbledore' person. The captain would have to be satisfied with that.

Now to report back to the /Nebuchadnezzar/.