The gears of the Hogwarts Maker Workshop had finally locked into motion, turning on their own in perfect synchrony. That allowed Alan, for the first time in weeks, to step back from the chaos of leadership and return to the quiet precision of thought.
Now, all his focus could rest upon the most extraordinary gift he had received from Helmut Volk.
The crystal dodecahedron Volk had sent him was less an "information vault" than a miniature cosmos, compressed to the edge of impossibility, glittering with the radiance of ancient intellect.
When Alan projected his consciousness into it, an ocean of data swept through his Thinking Palace. Fragments of forgotten knowledge blazed like stars across the inner firmament of his mind.
But then, amid that constellation, one trajectory stood apart.
It was not a spell.
Nor an alchemical recipe.
It was something stranger and far more elegant: a rune-based algorithm, complete, self-consistent, and terrifying in its logic.
An algorithm for prophecy.
This was no dreamy divination of the kind Professor Trelawney dramatized in her incense-thick classroom, filled with vague symbols and fatalistic pronouncements.
No, it did not seek to declare an absolute future.
Its core was pure and austere: probability computation.
Alan felt a thrill of awe and fear pierce through him. The system operated not on mystical intuition, but on a network of quantified interactions. It defined a target variable, a person, an object, an event, and then began to map every causal connection that touched it, visible or invisible, physical or magical.
Each link was weighed.
Each interaction measured.
And through a model so complex that even Alan, a "magical programmer," could only barely comprehend it, the algorithm generated a result:
A probabilistic forecast, the likelihood that a specific event would occur to that target within a given time frame.
Not prophecy.
Prediction.
The meteorology of destiny.
The intellectual temptation was irresistible. Alan needed to know if it worked.
A name rose unbidden in his mind,
Penelope Clearwater.
The Ravenclaw girl whose eyes always glimmered with thought, who carried her books as though they were relics, whose devotion to study made her one of the most sincere scholars at Hogwarts.
He entered her name as the key variable.
Then he set the event parameter: "to suffer academic deceit."
The runes ignited.
Within his mind, the Thinking Palace transformed into a colossal processor. Runes flared, collided, and reassembled; threads of logic intertwined into dense chains of cause and effect.
Penelope's routines, her research topics, her friendships, all turned to streams of neutral data, coursing into the computation.
Minutes stretched into half an hour. The mental strain drained him dry. Then, silence. The storm of runes froze.
At the center of the void, a single number appeared.
It pulsed in ancient glyphs, each stroke bleeding light, glowing with an ominous crimson brilliance.
92%.
A single figure that stabbed into Alan's consciousness like a hot needle.
A ninety-two percent probability that Penelope Clearwater would, within one week, suffer academic fraud.
That was no probability.
That was a sentence.
Cold dread spread through him like frost along his spine. His chest tightened until breathing hurt. He knew better than anyone what scholarship meant to Penelope, her pride, her identity, her very sense of worth.
If deceit were to taint that sacred world of hers, it would devastate her utterly.
The numbers haunted him all night like storm clouds.
The next morning's first class was Divination. Alan's mind was still frayed, haunted by the number, the red runes, the terrible clarity of prediction.
The classroom was thick with the cloying smell of sherry and cheap incense. Professor Sybill Trelawney loomed over her crystal ball, enormous spectacles magnifying her eyes until they seemed to float like moons.
Her voice murmured in the usual dreamy rhythm, the cadence of one forever half-asleep in another realm, until suddenly it sharpened.
"I see it… I see, "
Her tone sliced through the haze, sharp enough to wake even the drowsiest students.
Alan's head lifted involuntarily.
Trelawney was staring into the crystal ball, transfixed with terror and sorrow.
"In this very classroom," she breathed, "there dwells a young eagle… filled with hunger for knowledge…"
Alan's pupils contracted. Eagle, the symbol of Ravenclaw.
"Oh, poor child…" Trelawney whispered, voice trembling with theatrical pity. "Soon, her wings shall be ensnared… bound by a web spun of false and glittering knowledge…"
Silence fell.
Most of the class exchanged bemused glances. To them, it was just another of the professor's odd performances.
But Alan sat motionless, a thin sheen of cold sweat creeping down his back.
Two systems,
one born of ancient mathematical logic,
the other of mystical intuition,
utterly different in origin and nature,
had both arrived at the same result.
One was a surgeon's scalpel of reason.
The other, a fever dream of prophecy.
And together, they pointed toward a single, chilling truth.
Alan no longer doubted.
He had to act,
and quickly,
before the forecast became reality.
~~----------------------
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