Fanfic / Significant Digits

And remember the number 3

Significant Digits is a fanmade sequel to the popular Harry Potter fanfiction, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

The story is set approximately seven years after the end of HPMOR, and Harry has already revolutionized the wizarding world. Despite this, not all is well. The Tower School of Doubt is opposed in its efforts to abolish death by a reactionary coalition of the "Honourable", led by Draco Malfoy. Hermione Granger and those she has Returned from Dementation continue to raise havoc in their quest to destroy Dementors, no matter how the wizarding governments of the world feel about it. And at the center remains Harry, still bound by an Unbreakable Vow, trying to unite the world and reach the stars.

The author of HPMOR has read the fic, and has stated that he has considered making it canon.

It can be found here.

Tropes included in this work:

• Academy of Adventure: And not the good kind.
• Action Girl: Hermione and all the female members of the Returned, who collectively do most of the heavy combat across the plot.
• Affably Evil: Meldh is rather friendly, even as he rewrites people's wills to serve him and destroys all they hold dear.
• Alien Geometries: Harry's orbital pocket worlds, and the Tower itself has many hidden spaces that should not be present in three dimensions.
• Alphabetical Theme Naming: Harry seems to be going for this with the names of the Tower's departments. Of which there happen to be twenty-six.

• And the Adventure Continues: After defeating the Three, Harry departs Earth in the now spacebound Tower, to travel to Sagittarius A* and seek the fate of Dumbledore and Atlantis.
• Anti-Hero: With age, Harry has become much more willing to use questionable tactics, such as manipulating the entire world's loyalties to ultimately end united under him. This is a part of why he decides to leave Earth in the end.
• Anti-Magic: Thanks to the Mirror of Erised bringing about Harry's Coherent Extrapolated Volition, within the Tower the Killing Curse is no more lethal than a stunner, and the human spirit clings to life with utter tenacity.
• Anti-Villain: Draco's actions as the leader of the Honourable, which reduced the inevitable conflict over Harry's rise to a single cold war, ended peacefully.
• Arc Number: Three.
• Ascended Extra: Tonks and Moody are influential within Hermione and Harry's stories, respectively.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Harry complains about this a lot in regards to ancient artifacts, for being dangerously easy to lose (Elder Wand), inexorably lost (Cup of Midnight), or frustratingly esoteric in use (Mirror of Erised).
• Back from the Dead:
  • Hermione, twice. This is justified since she has a Horcrux and Harry has been interfering with the Killing Curse.
  • At the end, Lucius Malfoy, brought back from death with the sacrifice of an entire star.
• Badass Army:
  • Hermione's Returned, who are utterly devoted to her cause of destroying Dementors because they have nothing left from their own Dementations.
  • The grand army of the Three, consisting of many Terrasques, Basilisks, freed Dark Wizards, Unseelie, and hundreds of thousands of brainwashed Muggles.
• Badass Fingersnap: Returns in order to momentarily confuse Bellatrix Black. She doesn't recognize it or Harry, though she is indeed confused.
• Bag of Holding: Exploitation of these effects are granted an entire Tower research department, the Extension Establishment.
• Big Bad: The Three. And the leader of the Three: Merlin himself. Maybe.
• Celibate Hero: Hermione and Harry never did get around to that romance.
• The Chessmaster:
  • Harry and Draco, as they fight for control of the world, which is really just a ruse to consolidate power.
  • The Three, who have been playing the great game for centuries at a minimum, all with the goal of managing the extinction of magic in the world.:
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: Luna's...nature turns out to harbor scientific genius after being taught rationality.
• Crazy-Prepared: Mad-Eye Moody attempts to break into the Tower and mock-assassinate Harry every odd-numbered day, which only makes the Tower guards even more paranoid on even-numbered days.
• Department of Redundancy Department: The 'blastbomb', which becomes wizarding kind's name for normal explosives, much to Harry's frustration.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The Lethe Touch, which takes centuries to learn but is a total and modular form of mind control, permanent unless a similarly lost counterspell is given, and genuinely changes the will of the target in a way that the Imperius cannot.
• Double Reverse Quadruple Agent: Moody's role as Amycus Carrow among the Honourable, which is in fact not even a double agent scenario as the Honourable were always controlled opposition.
• Eccentric Mentor: Harry serves as mentor to a few promising Hogwarts students.
• Exact Words: "Bah!"
• Gender Bender: For some reason, half the time, Alastor Moody chooses to change himself into as a woman. This probably has no other reason than that it's a good way to throw off someone who's expecting them.
• Human Subspecies: Recognizing the sapient Beings as people is a central policy of the Treaty of Health and Life, which is radical enough to cause problems even among supporters.
• Immortality Seeker: Harry's goal, though technically accomplished through the use of human transfiguration in conjunction with the Stone of Permanency, cannot be deployed on a wide enough scale to protect all humanity.
• Intrinsic Vow: How the Goblet of Fire works, bestowing unavoidable penalties on vow breakers. As an artifact of Atlantis, the age of its magic is critical in breaking Meldh's Lethe Touch spell, which is beyond modern wizards but breakable by the cup.
• The Magic Goes Away: One of Harry's fears is that magic may vanish, forever truncating human potential. And it turns out that the Three have been actively guiding this process to its conclusion.
• Magitek: Ostensibly the goal of the Tower, which has at the time of the story succeeded in protecting electronics from magic interference and building a magical spacecraft.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: In the end, Harry gives Merlin himself one chance to cede the world's future and depart in peace. He takes it.
• Noodle Incident: The Salamander Incident. Whatever it is, it instantly convinces Hig that Harry could not possibly be Voldemort in any way, even though Harry is in fact partially Voldemort. It is later implied to have had something to do with using a swarm of salamanders as a living shield against the killing curse, and that Moody and Bones thought the entire incident was cute.
• No One Gets Left Behind: Harry still wants no one to die - not even Voldemort or Bellatrix.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. As well as Harry Potter, there is a Harry Madagascar working in the Tower and another Harry as the writer of a classical magic text.
• Parody Episode: The chapter where other franchises are rationalized, in the vein of the Omake Files chapters from HPMOR
• Prophecy Twist: Harry finally 'tears apart the stars in heaven', and it turns out not to be the widely-assumed scenario of stellar lifting but a sacrificial ritual which can resurrect a truly dead person for the cost of a star's life. One person, one star. Harry wisely does not use it except to fulfill his promise to resurrect Lucius Malfoy, choosing as young and small a star as he can find, which would have died long before it could support intelligent life.
• Recursive Fanfiction: The meta-meta prequel, Orders of Magnitude.
• Retired Monster: Voldemort, though he didn't have much of a choice. He's left trapped as a conscious plant in an unbreakable box, with only Harry for conversation and audio tapes for entertainment.
• Shout-Out: While there are epigraphs set at the beginning and end of each chapter (ranging from plays to poems to texts), there are also several less direct references:
  • Grindelwald was said to have possessed Satomi's Dogs, seven orange crystal balls, spangled with glowing red stars. (Additionally, the voice actor of Zeno, the absolute ruler of the Dragon Ball multiverse, is Satomi Koorogi.)
  • The uncontrollable compulsion to speak excess statements of truth, caused by an overdose of Veritaserum, is termed the "Uncontrollable Utterance Ailment" by magical medicine. Harry prefers to call it Prak syndrome.
• Star Killing: Harry found a way to defeat death, alright. One star may be traded for one life. He decides to use it only once out of entropy concerns, though Meldh wished to use it in order to conquer the world with on-demand resurrections keeping loyalty.
• Wham Episode: Meldh's mental subversion of the entire Tower, including Harry, Draco, and Moody, in less than a single day.
• Wham Line: "Merlin."
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The world at large still resists the rights of Goblins, Centaurs, and Hags, in spite of Harry's immense influence.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? Magic shields are often said to be weak to muggle weapons, and this is exactly what happens to Perenelle du Marais, felled by a rifle.
• Xanatos Gambit: Harry and Draco's false cold war, kept going in part by Hermione's self-sealed memory of the plan.
• You Killed My Father: Neville in regards to Bellatrix.
  Bellatrix: Stop!
  Neville: That's what THEY said to YOU! Avada Kedavra!