I’m mildly surprised no-one has speculated on what Harry will do next. He won’t accept that Hermione is dead, and I’m guessing that it will occur to him that transfiguring her into a steel ball and then freezing it (I’m pretty sure there’s a spell for that) provides a quick and easy form of cryonics, which as an added bonus bypasses the problem of ice crystal formation.
I would nominate the Blood-Cooling Charm as a convenient and adequately-foreshadowed first response. Like packing a recently-deceased patient in ice, that will buy her enough time until she can be properly cryopreserved. That is, literally stuffed in the fridge. One of the FFnet reviewers had it right: this chapter was an epic troll.
ETA: Gah! Bleugh. There’s just no getting rid of the taste of a wrong prediction. It’s like a mouth full of soy sauce.
Cryonics doesn’t work on someone that’s already dead, and Harry’s not so distraught that he won’t recognize that. I also don’t think Harry can sustain a transfiguration like that for long without exhausting his limited supply of magical energy. Harry has evidence that some soul-like thing left Hermione’s body, so if he wants to revive her he needs to get it back. I vote for reverse-engineering Time Turners and doing some more substantive kind of time magic, since that would also serve many of his other goals, although maybe Eliezer will prohibit that because it would allow him to get too powerful too quickly.
Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there’s usually only one thing you can do.
…
Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
Point, I wasn’t carefully distinguishing between legal / clinical death and information-theoretic death. But I think there is reason (namely the magical echo) to believe that Hermione is currently information-theoretically dead, or at the very least has lost her magic.
No. I mention that as an alternative hypothesis about what happened, but my dominant hypothesis is still that Hermione has lost her soul or whatever and so her body as it stands is information-theoretically dead. If Harry wants to bring her back to her life, he needs to track down her soul.
But for your reasoning upthread to work, Harry has to be so sure that the outpouring of magic carried all the information about Hermione that it’s not worth it to him to try and protect her brain, and with (a) his protestations that brain damage means that the information must be in the brain and (b) there not being a shred of evidence that I can remember off the top of my head that Muggles require any magic to run (in which case witches/wizards’ brains/souls would presumably have to work completely differently from Muggles), I don’t think Harry is at a point where he can conclude that the chance of reviving her by saving the body is so low that he should concentrate his efforts on chasing her souly-looking emanation of magic.
Harry currently thinks that Atlantis is some form of system that locks onto human bodies with the Blood Of Atlantis gene and detects their commands (spells, odd potion-making actions, etc).
A simple explanation for Horcrux is that it is basically a form of uploading. Although that would make it seem overly simple for Sufficiently Creative Harry to find a way to make horcruxes without human sacrifice.
Alternatively, a wizard’s soul has read-only access to their brain.
I’m not claiming that recoverable info-containing souls are a completely crazy outlandish hypothesis; I merely claim that Harry is nowhere near having enough support for this hypothesis to stake Hermione’s life on it being true.
I find it somewhat unlikely that this magical echo is supposed to equate to information-theoretic death if it occurred within a span of seconds after Hermione was still capable of talking.
(Assuming that you meant to say “still alive” and interpreting this as “had ever been done on somebody who wasn’t clinically/legally dead”; not sure that that’s what you meant, but if not, I don’t understand your comment:) Qiaochu has already explained that he was talking about information-theoretic death there.
(ETA: If you meant that nobody’s actually been brought back to life, that still doesn’t seem to conflict with the correct-by-definition claim that cryonics doesn’t work after information-theoretic death.)
I think Qiaochu_Yuan is referring to cryobiology; I don’t know how far the military is with its suspended animation trials, but I think it’s possible they’ve done it to people (I know they’ve successfully done it to dogs).
I also don’t think Harry can sustain a transfiguration like that for long without exhausting his limited supply of magical energy.
While I agree with the rest of the comment, this part is strictly false. We know that Harry can sustain a transfiguration roughly like that indefinitely, as evidenced by his father’s rock.
I would be surprised if it took comparable amounts of magical energy to keep a rock transfigured vs. a human body, but who knows how the energy requirements of transfiguration really work.
I thought it worked by size? I’m pretty sure that was stated earlier in the story. And I’d imagine that a boulder like Harry’s father’s rock could be roughly a similar size/wight/mass to a 12 year old girl.
Hmm. My guess, based on the kind of logic that seems to govern most magic, would have been that the amount of magical energy required has something to do with how different the two things you’re transfiguring between are. But again, who knows how the energy requirements of transfiguration really work.
I was also under the impression that Harry had to keep the rock with him at all times to keep it transfigured. Would he also have to keep Hermione with him at all times? Also, the transfiguration stops if Harry exhausts his magic for whatever other reason, and I don’t think he’d want to risk that happening to Hermione.
As it happens, I was reading the The Black Company dark fantasy series lat month; one of the powerful wizards in it, Shifter (he’s a shapeshifter specialist) goes around with a staff carved into a beautiful woman—which was originally just that. He’s a quasi-insane evil villain.
So… the fantasy precedents aren’t that great, I guess I am saying.
I’m not trying to imply anything naughty here, but Hermione is somewhat softer than that rock. (Until you see her angry.)
Not to mention he doesn’t have any obvious need to keep Hermione on his finger all the time, unlike the rock. Just long enough to find some safe spot to hide her. (Unless he plans to revive her within the next couple of days.)
It’s not a long-term solution, especially given Harry’s exciting life. But it’s better than no solution. There’ll be time to brainstorm a better storage system later.
As far as I can tell, transfiguration mana requirements are based on the size of the assumed form, and there can be a huge size change (such as a 20 kg? rocket from a small ice cube taking a long time) and the very easy partial-transfiguration slicing.
Harry doesn’t need to keep the rock at all times. He just needs to contact it more often than once every transfiguration duration.
What makes you think that she’s dead? Dumbledore saying so, even though she did not experience sudden injury (per the established wards of Hogwarts)? Were her legs bitten off slowly enough to not qualify, or was the Blood-Cooling Charm used against Malfoy excessive underkill?
People believed for a long time that cessation of heartbeat is irreversible. While this is less likely to be such a mistake (wizards have some stasis spells for medical use, so at least sometimes they would have more time to assess whether anything works on such a supposedly dead person), it’s still possible.
Also, I’d like to posit this: this is the moment the magic decides the person is no more and from this point on any magic that works on a person won’t work on him/her. But, nonmagical intervention and spells that aren’t designed to target a person could still reverse it.
This is a good point, and furthermore in the story it goes straight from Hermione saying her last words to her death , whereas in real life I believe if circulation stops instantly (which isn’t exactly the case here) you lose consciousness within 15 seconds, but it takes 4 minutes before brain damage starts. Which means they still have time to perform a blood transfusion and try to save her.
More generally, has any wizard/witch ever been brought back after their heart stopped? Does the soul reenter the body? If not, do they end up in a coma, or do they maybe get a new soul?
Even if wizards do not practice cpr, surely some wizards would have had heart attacks while in the presence of muggles.
CPR started to spread in the 1960s. Given how few wizards there are, and how little time most of them spend in the company of muggles, my no-actual-math-involved guess is that it isn’t that likely.
I seem to remember that the wizard population of the UK is about 10000, which would extrapolate to 1 000 000 worldwide. Given that many wizards do have muggle family…
Ok, some math—conservativly speaking, if 10% of wizards have contact with muggles, and spend 1% of their time in the company of these muggles, with an average death rate of .6%, 40% of which is by heart attack, but only 40% of heart attacks are fatal, and 10% of the times that a heart attack happens in the presence of muggles the wizard dies and then the heart is restarted, then there would be an average of .6 wizards being brought back from the dead per year.
But more to the point, surely some muggle-born wizards would practice cpr, or even improve on it using magic? With a population of 1000000, surely someone sometime would have transfigured a defibrillator in an emergency?
We also have reason to believe Dumbledore has a motive to convince Harry that death is inevitable.
ETA: and no evidence supporting the hypothesis that what was killed is Hermione, instead of a simulacrum; we only have absurd priors that it was her, and the evidence suggests that one of our very likely priors is wrong.
Because the real Hermione was under an invisibility cloak ten feet away. (Not saying this is how it happened, but it does explain that part of the riddle)
Bellatrix was still transparent within the Cloak, but to Harry she was no longer hidden, he knew that she was there, as obvious to him as a Thestral.
It would have had to have been a different cloak than Harry’s, but then, I guess Hermione did have one on her; it might not have been good enough to hide her from the troll, but perhaps it would have hid her from Harry. And I suppose that obscuring the real Hermione from Harry would make sense under the ‘if you want to change the past, you can’t know if you’ve already succeeded’ rule, from the end of 76.
The silver outline blasted back into the world, and said in the strange outside version of Harry’s own voice, “Hermione Granger says,” the blazing figure’s voice became higher-pitched, “AHHHHHHHHH!”
I commented elsewhere that this is a major difficulty with trying to save her. Invisible Hermione would have to scream in the middle of combat to fake out the patronus, which is obviously an incredibly dangerous thing to do.
Hmmm… it’s also possible in that scenario that Hermione was hot-swapped out of the combat. Real!Hermione responded with a terrified scream to the Patronus, and while Present!Harry was racing to her on a broom, Time-Turned!Harry did some kind of obscuring spell (fog, blast of light, something like that), tossed an invisibility cloak (not Harry’s) over Real!Hermione, and then fed Simulacrum!Hermione to the troll just in time for Present!Harry to show up.
When asked to find Hermione, why would Harry’s Patronus have found a simulacrum instead of the real one?
The Patronus that came back to Harry could be Future-Harry’s Patronus, if time travel is involved.
Note: I don’t personally place a high probability on theories involving time travel in this instance, but they do present a possible explanation for that objection.
If the Patronus that came back was Future-Harry’s Patronus, then what happened to Present-Harry’s Patronus? When Harry’s Patronus was countered with Quirell’s Killing Curse in Chapter 54, Harry definitely felt it being countered.
Even if Harry now believes in souls (and what happened to Hermione looks to me like magical death throws, if I was Harry it would be insufficient evidence to overcome my priors) then surely he would want to preserve her body so the soul has something to occupy?
Maintaining the transfiguration is easy, keeping it cold is harder as you would have to repeatedly cast the cooling charm, but I doubt the internal structure of a strong metal changes much over time even at room temperature, and he would ask Quirrel for help, because adult help will probably be needed anyway for recovering her soul. Quirrel will be delighted to see Harry devote himself to the magical conquest of death.
As for time turners, being able to go back further than 6 hours and change history is an instant victory, unless both sides have them, in which case the story changes completely into a time war. I don’t think that’s where EY wants to take it, unless maybe in the last chapter, post-magical singularity, they travel back with invisibility cloaks and save everyone who has ever died.
I’m mildly surprised no-one has speculated on what Harry will do next. He won’t accept that Hermione is dead, and I’m guessing that it will occur to him that transfiguring her into a steel ball and then freezing it (I’m pretty sure there’s a spell for that) provides a quick and easy form of cryonics, which as an added bonus bypasses the problem of ice crystal formation.
How to resurrect her is the tricky bit.
I would nominate the Blood-Cooling Charm as a convenient and adequately-foreshadowed first response. Like packing a recently-deceased patient in ice, that will buy her enough time until she can be properly cryopreserved. That is, literally stuffed in the fridge. One of the FFnet reviewers had it right: this chapter was an epic troll.
ETA: Gah! Bleugh. There’s just no getting rid of the taste of a wrong prediction. It’s like a mouth full of soy sauce.
Cryonics doesn’t work on someone that’s already dead, and Harry’s not so distraught that he won’t recognize that. I also don’t think Harry can sustain a transfiguration like that for long without exhausting his limited supply of magical energy. Harry has evidence that some soul-like thing left Hermione’s body, so if he wants to revive her he needs to get it back. I vote for reverse-engineering Time Turners and doing some more substantive kind of time magic, since that would also serve many of his other goals, although maybe Eliezer will prohibit that because it would allow him to get too powerful too quickly.
What about all the people who signed up to get frozen after they die?
Point, I wasn’t carefully distinguishing between legal / clinical death and information-theoretic death. But I think there is reason (namely the magical echo) to believe that Hermione is currently information-theoretically dead, or at the very least has lost her magic.
Do you think Harry would care even the tiniest bit about her losing her magic if she came back to life?
I mean… yes, but not enough to not bring her back to life.
No. I mention that as an alternative hypothesis about what happened, but my dominant hypothesis is still that Hermione has lost her soul or whatever and so her body as it stands is information-theoretically dead. If Harry wants to bring her back to her life, he needs to track down her soul.
But for your reasoning upthread to work, Harry has to be so sure that the outpouring of magic carried all the information about Hermione that it’s not worth it to him to try and protect her brain, and with (a) his protestations that brain damage means that the information must be in the brain and (b) there not being a shred of evidence that I can remember off the top of my head that Muggles require any magic to run (in which case witches/wizards’ brains/souls would presumably have to work completely differently from Muggles), I don’t think Harry is at a point where he can conclude that the chance of reviving her by saving the body is so low that he should concentrate his efforts on chasing her souly-looking emanation of magic.
Fair point.
Harry currently thinks that Atlantis is some form of system that locks onto human bodies with the Blood Of Atlantis gene and detects their commands (spells, odd potion-making actions, etc).
A simple explanation for Horcrux is that it is basically a form of uploading. Although that would make it seem overly simple for Sufficiently Creative Harry to find a way to make horcruxes without human sacrifice.
Alternatively, a wizard’s soul has read-only access to their brain.
I’m not claiming that recoverable info-containing souls are a completely crazy outlandish hypothesis; I merely claim that Harry is nowhere near having enough support for this hypothesis to stake Hermione’s life on it being true.
I find it somewhat unlikely that this magical echo is supposed to equate to information-theoretic death if it occurred within a span of seconds after Hermione was still capable of talking.
? I wasn’t aware cryonics had ever been done on someone that’s already alive.
(Assuming that you meant to say “still alive” and interpreting this as “had ever been done on somebody who wasn’t clinically/legally dead”; not sure that that’s what you meant, but if not, I don’t understand your comment:) Qiaochu has already explained that he was talking about information-theoretic death there.
(ETA: If you meant that nobody’s actually been brought back to life, that still doesn’t seem to conflict with the correct-by-definition claim that cryonics doesn’t work after information-theoretic death.)
I think Qiaochu_Yuan is referring to cryobiology; I don’t know how far the military is with its suspended animation trials, but I think it’s possible they’ve done it to people (I know they’ve successfully done it to dogs).
While I agree with the rest of the comment, this part is strictly false. We know that Harry can sustain a transfiguration roughly like that indefinitely, as evidenced by his father’s rock.
I would be surprised if it took comparable amounts of magical energy to keep a rock transfigured vs. a human body, but who knows how the energy requirements of transfiguration really work.
I thought it worked by size? I’m pretty sure that was stated earlier in the story. And I’d imagine that a boulder like Harry’s father’s rock could be roughly a similar size/wight/mass to a 12 year old girl.
Hmm. My guess, based on the kind of logic that seems to govern most magic, would have been that the amount of magical energy required has something to do with how different the two things you’re transfiguring between are. But again, who knows how the energy requirements of transfiguration really work.
I was also under the impression that Harry had to keep the rock with him at all times to keep it transfigured. Would he also have to keep Hermione with him at all times? Also, the transfiguration stops if Harry exhausts his magic for whatever other reason, and I don’t think he’d want to risk that happening to Hermione.
He now has a ring on his hand without a jewel. He could put Hermione there.
How romantic, in a very… Well, something.
I mean… “keeping your best female friend’s dead body on a ring on your finger”...
As it happens, I was reading the The Black Company dark fantasy series lat month; one of the powerful wizards in it, Shifter (he’s a shapeshifter specialist) goes around with a staff carved into a beautiful woman—which was originally just that. He’s a quasi-insane evil villain.
So… the fantasy precedents aren’t that great, I guess I am saying.
I suspect the ring is Hermione. The dead body in the cell is probably a death doll made from the old ring.
Magical exhaustion would mean cutting off his finger with a restored Hermione. That’s why the rock was transfigured into a jewel and not a ring.
I’m not trying to imply anything naughty here, but Hermione is somewhat softer than that rock. (Until you see her angry.)
Not to mention he doesn’t have any obvious need to keep Hermione on his finger all the time, unlike the rock. Just long enough to find some safe spot to hide her. (Unless he plans to revive her within the next couple of days.)
It’s not a long-term solution, especially given Harry’s exciting life. But it’s better than no solution. There’ll be time to brainstorm a better storage system later.
As far as I can tell, transfiguration mana requirements are based on the size of the assumed form, and there can be a huge size change (such as a 20 kg? rocket from a small ice cube taking a long time) and the very easy partial-transfiguration slicing.
Harry doesn’t need to keep the rock at all times. He just needs to contact it more often than once every transfiguration duration.
What makes you think that she’s dead? Dumbledore saying so, even though she did not experience sudden injury (per the established wards of Hogwarts)? Were her legs bitten off slowly enough to not qualify, or was the Blood-Cooling Charm used against Malfoy excessive underkill?
Yes. At this point in the story, Dumbledore knows a lot more than Harry does about how magical people die.
People believed for a long time that cessation of heartbeat is irreversible. While this is less likely to be such a mistake (wizards have some stasis spells for medical use, so at least sometimes they would have more time to assess whether anything works on such a supposedly dead person), it’s still possible.
Also, I’d like to posit this: this is the moment the magic decides the person is no more and from this point on any magic that works on a person won’t work on him/her. But, nonmagical intervention and spells that aren’t designed to target a person could still reverse it.
This is a good point, and furthermore in the story it goes straight from Hermione saying her last words to her death , whereas in real life I believe if circulation stops instantly (which isn’t exactly the case here) you lose consciousness within 15 seconds, but it takes 4 minutes before brain damage starts. Which means they still have time to perform a blood transfusion and try to save her. More generally, has any wizard/witch ever been brought back after their heart stopped? Does the soul reenter the body? If not, do they end up in a coma, or do they maybe get a new soul?
Even if wizards do not practice cpr, surely some wizards would have had heart attacks while in the presence of muggles.
CPR started to spread in the 1960s. Given how few wizards there are, and how little time most of them spend in the company of muggles, my no-actual-math-involved guess is that it isn’t that likely.
I seem to remember that the wizard population of the UK is about 10000, which would extrapolate to 1 000 000 worldwide. Given that many wizards do have muggle family…
Ok, some math—conservativly speaking, if 10% of wizards have contact with muggles, and spend 1% of their time in the company of these muggles, with an average death rate of .6%, 40% of which is by heart attack, but only 40% of heart attacks are fatal, and 10% of the times that a heart attack happens in the presence of muggles the wizard dies and then the heart is restarted, then there would be an average of .6 wizards being brought back from the dead per year.
But more to the point, surely some muggle-born wizards would practice cpr, or even improve on it using magic? With a population of 1000000, surely someone sometime would have transfigured a defibrillator in an emergency?
Possibly the Horcrux is simply a spell to transfer the Atlantis user account to a magical soul?
We also have reason to believe Dumbledore has a motive to convince Harry that death is inevitable.
ETA: and no evidence supporting the hypothesis that what was killed is Hermione, instead of a simulacrum; we only have absurd priors that it was her, and the evidence suggests that one of our very likely priors is wrong.
When asked to find Hermione, why would Harry’s Patronus have found a simulacrum instead of the real one?
Because the real Hermione was under an invisibility cloak ten feet away. (Not saying this is how it happened, but it does explain that part of the riddle)
From Chapter 56:
It would have had to have been a different cloak than Harry’s, but then, I guess Hermione did have one on her; it might not have been good enough to hide her from the troll, but perhaps it would have hid her from Harry. And I suppose that obscuring the real Hermione from Harry would make sense under the ‘if you want to change the past, you can’t know if you’ve already succeeded’ rule, from the end of 76.
I commented elsewhere that this is a major difficulty with trying to save her. Invisible Hermione would have to scream in the middle of combat to fake out the patronus, which is obviously an incredibly dangerous thing to do.
Hmmm… it’s also possible in that scenario that Hermione was hot-swapped out of the combat. Real!Hermione responded with a terrified scream to the Patronus, and while Present!Harry was racing to her on a broom, Time-Turned!Harry did some kind of obscuring spell (fog, blast of light, something like that), tossed an invisibility cloak (not Harry’s) over Real!Hermione, and then fed Simulacrum!Hermione to the troll just in time for Present!Harry to show up.
The Patronus that came back to Harry could be Future-Harry’s Patronus, if time travel is involved.
Note: I don’t personally place a high probability on theories involving time travel in this instance, but they do present a possible explanation for that objection.
Every consistent theory I’ve seen involves time-travel somehow. The stakes are simply too high for Harry to permit the attempt to not be made.
If the Patronus that came back was Future-Harry’s Patronus, then what happened to Present-Harry’s Patronus? When Harry’s Patronus was countered with Quirell’s Killing Curse in Chapter 54, Harry definitely felt it being countered.
It’s plausible that having one’s Patronus dispelled by one’s future self is not as noticeable as having one’s Patronus countered by a killing curse.
Alternatively, an even simpler option is that it was still Present-Harry’s patronus, just given updated instructions by Future-Harry.
Wait, what about these chapters did you find implausible enough that you want to challenge one of your priors?
The wards against sudden injury didn’t trigger, the troll was buffed beyond reasonable expectation, medical treatment which should have worked didn’t.
I didn’t specify which of (edit) my priors was wrong, because I don’t know which one to identify.
Narrative convention suggests it’s awfully unlikely that Eliezer would drop a bomb like this with an update gap in between if it were a false alarm.
Even if Harry now believes in souls (and what happened to Hermione looks to me like magical death throws, if I was Harry it would be insufficient evidence to overcome my priors) then surely he would want to preserve her body so the soul has something to occupy? Maintaining the transfiguration is easy, keeping it cold is harder as you would have to repeatedly cast the cooling charm, but I doubt the internal structure of a strong metal changes much over time even at room temperature, and he would ask Quirrel for help, because adult help will probably be needed anyway for recovering her soul. Quirrel will be delighted to see Harry devote himself to the magical conquest of death.
As for time turners, being able to go back further than 6 hours and change history is an instant victory, unless both sides have them, in which case the story changes completely into a time war. I don’t think that’s where EY wants to take it, unless maybe in the last chapter, post-magical singularity, they travel back with invisibility cloaks and save everyone who has ever died.