December arrived, the rain, the wind, and the chill were like a summer’s day to Anastasia. Leningrad, now that place had proper winters. Dr Anastasia Zaitseva was a world-renowned theoretical physicist. She trained in the best universities in Russia and was now working on research projects in the Imperial College Physics Department. However, she still talked to herself; “What am I doing here.”
It wasn’t a question. She knew what she was doing. The project in the Physics Department of the Imperial College, the one that was going to be the pinnacle of her career was over. There were simulations to run, papers to finish, final submissions for review to be made. It was no good. The creep Fischer had stolen the whole lot from her. Everything that she was forced to pass to him for assessment, he had cut and pasted into his own paper and published without even one mention of her. The great academic credit thief had done it again. He had done it many times before, to many others. All the post-graduate researchers dreaded having him assigned to them. He stole original research and claimed it as his own. When accusations of academic credit theft were made, he replied that the students were mistaken. He claimed to have directed the research, giving the students his own original ideas which they then wrote into their own essays. He seemed to have limitless influence. He was accepted as the brilliant scientist. The powerless researchers who suffered were ignored.
Once her final submissions were made, she would be out of the research offices. Her cards would be taken. No new project offers would be made. She would have to look for a proper job, she had to pay rent, buy food for her son, and carry on living; Dr Anastasia Zaitseva PhD, teaching physics and mathematics to unwilling fourteen-year-old students.
The office door still opened for her. Her login to the network still worked, for today at least. The simulation loaded up, the simulation which modelled the real simulation which would be run in the super-computer she no longer had the funding to use. The run completed; the results would be posted to her email address. Then something weird happened. This was a world-renowned scientific research facility, nothing weird happens here; not that much anyway.
The instant the run finished Anastasia heard a soft but solid thump come from the wall behind her desk. She looked around, where there had been a plain plaster wall there was now a plain plaster wall with a door in it. On examination it appeared to be an old door, centuries old by the look of it. No one else was in the room. The door felt real. It was the same temperature as the rest of the wall. There were normal gaps at the top and bottom. There was normal air flowing in underneath the door. The air was cool.
This was a complex hallucination; it was still there after an hour. If it was a hallucination there was no risk in opening the door. The handle turned easily, and the door swung into the office. On the far side was a corridor, lined with tiles. At the far end was a corridor crossing at right angles. Anastasia stood at the door waiting for something to happen. She knew that there was another office on the other side of the wall, but this door opened to somewhere else.
Then the weirdness doubled; a paper dart flew around the left corner from the cross corridor. It flew straight to Anastasia and dived into her coat pocket. The dart sat in her pocket. Anastasia took it out and unfolded what turned out to be a parchment letter. Anastasia read the letter; the weirdness tripled.
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Dear Dr Zaitseva,
Please do not be alarmed. As much as possible, do not mention what has happened to anyone. Please close the door, and do not open it again. We shall try to remove it as soon as possible. I must meet you to discuss this incident.
Please be at the Corinthia Hotel, Whitehall Place, London for afternoon tea at 4pm this afternoon.
…….………………………………….
Harry Potter
Senior Auror
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The hotel was big and expensive, in London that meant grossly expensive. Anastasia waited outside the main entrance. At 4pm a chauffeured blue Bentley pulled up and a young-looking dark-haired man wearing old fashioned round spectacles got out. He walked up to Anastasia; “Dr Zaitseva, how do you do. I’m Harry Potter, shall we go in?”
“Only if you’re paying, this place is off the scale for what I can spend.”
“Don’t worry about that. It’s on my expense account.”
The table was waiting for them, the staff seemed to know Harry and served tea and cakes with a minimum of fuss.
“How are you feeling about what happened today? Can you tell me anything about what happened from your point of view?”
“From my point of view. Yes! You know, my area of research uses the concept of differing points of view to give different results from the same event. That’s simplified beyond recognition, but it will do for now. I don’t have any ideas about what happened. My work was in Quantum Physics. If you mention that to any science fiction fan they will jump straight to parallel universes and portals mysteriously popping up to join them together. Which is an awful lot like a what seemed to happen. All of my work, years of it, proves that nothing like that can possibly happen.”
There was a long silence, it was no more than ten seconds, but it seemed a lot longer. Harry decided to fill the void.
“The mind is a liar. It deceives us all the time. It makes up an entire fiction about what the eyes see, the ears hear, the nerves feel. It decides what it already knows to be there before it sees, hears, and touches. Most people when they see the door would not see it because it was not in the image of the wall the mind had in it. You are not encumbered by this sort of preconception. You saw what was there.”
Harry paused for breath and carried on. “I can tell you that the door, and the corridors really do exist. They are in the Department of Mysteries, which is a department of the Ministry of Magic. I am employed by the Ministry as a law enforcement officer. They give me jobs like this because for some reason people believe what I tell them, no matter how unbelievable it is.”
“What we would like to know is, how the connection was made to your office, and how we are going to end the connection, because right now we can’t. What we have been able to do is set up an illusion in your office so that any person, other than you, won’t see the door; using the mental weakness I described before.”
The tea and cakes were really good. Anastasia enjoyed another delicacy and cup of tea. Harry sipped his tea and watched Anastasia.
Anastasia took a deep breath and sighed. “You are good at deception. Detailed deception, hiding things in plain sight, persuading people that things are what they seem to be and not what they really are. When you say ‘we’, how many of you are there? Do the state security people know about you?”
Harry considered for a second. “In the UK there are about fifty thousand practitioners. The legal authority controlling our activities is the Ministry of Magic. The Ministry has about two thousand five hundred officers at the moment. The Ministry is connected to the government of the UK through the Prime Minister’s office. It’s a collaborative arrangement rather than authoritative. Our society is ancient, we have always described ourselves as wizards and witches. The power and energy we use we call magic. We seem to be born with the ability to focus and control power from some part of the universe. We can’t give the gift to someone who is not born with it.”
The tearoom was emptying. Anastasia came to a decision. “I would like to find out more about your work. I need a new career. My project is finishing within a few days, and it is most unlikely that I will be given another. You obviously have resources. Can you involve me in an investigation of what the hell is going on?”
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