Desert of the Real

By RaistlinofMetallica

V: Fact and Fiction

Draco reeled from the disorientation as he suddenly found himself in an endless, empty white space. He grabbed his head and started when he realized he couldn't see the little black metal thing that was in his arm. His clothes had also changed back into his Hogwarts robe, everything just as it was before this Matrix nonsense started.

"It's called residual self-image," Potter said from behind him. "We take on the forms we are most familiar with."

Draco whirled, immediately going for his wand and was surprised to find it in his pocket, as he thought he'd dropped it earlier. He cracked a maniacal grin. It was time for payback.

Potter hardly seemed surprised at all and, more infuriatingly, dodged or countered every spell tossed at him as if it were child's play.

Draco screamed in rage and frustration.

"Incarcerous," Potter said, again from behind him, and Draco found himself bound too tightly to be able to do anything as Potter took away his wand. "Now that you've got that out of your system, are you ready to listen?"

"You bastard, you tried to kill me!" Draco hissed, clenching his hands into fists.

Potter rolled his eyes, drawing back. He twirled Draco's wand in between his fingers and pocketed it in his robes. "You're still hung up on that?"

"You tried to kill me," Draco repeated slowly, as if speaking to an exceptionally slow cousin of Goyle's.

"Why don't you take a look around and tell me what you see?" Potter asked.

Draco bristled, straining against the ropes. "Don't change the bloody subject!"

"Right now, I'm the only one in this place who knows how to get out and the only one who can release you from that spell," Potter said harshly. "Now, you said you wanted to know what the Matrix is. I figured you'd appreciate the explanation coming from a familiar face, so shut up and take a bloody look around."

Draco scowled and proudly raised his head, glancing around. "What am I supposed to be looking for? Everything's white."

"This place is called the Construct," Potter explained. "Every book that ever existed, every potion ever made, anything and everything we've ever needed, down to our clothes and wands – all of it is accessible in this space if we need it. This place is where we prepare to enter the Matrix."

Potter paused, raising his head incrementally. "Operator, please load the outside view."

The white vanished, dropping Potter and Draco into a scene ripped straight from his worst nightmares. The world was a blackened, twisted wasteland, filled with monsters made of metal and horrible twisted towers.

"This is the real world," Potter said quietly, "Or what's left of it."

Draco stared in horror. This couldn't be real. Potter had to be pulling his leg.

"I know what you're thinking," Potter continued. "That it can't be like this and that I'm playing a cruel trick – I thought the exact same thing when I was shown this. I wish I could tell you it is a trick. It's not. It's worse, it's so much worse."

Potter paused, leaning back on his heels and looking up at the sky. "A long time ago, muggles made machines that ran off the power of sunlight and could think like humans. Those machines rebelled against their creators and, to stop them, the muggles destroyed the sun."

"But the machines were not so easily destroyed," Potter said, frowning as he looked down. The ground shifted and they were now viewing a field of cluster-like sacks suspended on long, spindly stalks. Giant spider-like machines moved among them, collecting the sacks. "They discovered a new power source – humans."

Draco cried out in alarm as they were suddenly shifted closer to the sacks, close enough to see the infants with the plugs being fitted into them surgically. "Why didn't anyone stop them?" he asked, choking back the urge to vomit as the image shifted again, this time to show infants being loaded and wired into pods. "Why didn't the Wizengamot interfere?"

The world shifted back to jarring white as the ropes binding Draco fell away.

"Because wizards don't exist, Draco," Potter said bitterly. He tossed something at Draco's feet.

It was a book.

Draco leaned down, picking it up, and turned it over.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the title declared in bold yellow letters.

"I knew you were full of yourself, Potter, but this –" Draco started.

Potter threw down another book. "Chamber of Secrets," he spat, and then tossed down a third, "Prisoner of Azkaban," a fourth book followed, "Goblet of Fire" and so on until a small pile of the brightly colored books lay at Draco's feet.

"These books," Potter snarled, "Were written centuries ago by a woman I've never met as entertainment for children. The real Harry Potter was a character in those books. He never existed."

Draco looked at the book in his hand and then at his rival, who had obviously gone clear round the twist.

"All my life, I've been living out a storybook," Potter ground out. "Every action I thought was my own was scripted out for me. All my friends, all the teachers, even Voldemort... all of them followed the same script. You don't believe me? Take a look for yourself."

Draco was not inclined to read about the Great Loony Prat's life, but when Potter pointed out a page number, he flipped to the page and started to read. It hit him, suddenly, that the scene he was reading was word-for-word his first encounter with Potter in Madam Malkin's six years ago, from a third person perspective of Potter. Another page number was called and he was reading about that awful detention in the Forbidden Forest. Again, it was in third person perspective.

"It was Voldemort, you know, eating the unicorns," Potter said, as if it were a matter of the weather. He walked over and leaned down, pushing through the books. "I've read almost all of them. It's so close... there are little deviations here and there, but it's exactly the same as I remember it."

Potter paused, laughing humorlessly. "I can't bring myself to read the last two. I'm not sure I want to know how it was supposed to end."

"How...?" Draco murmured, looking at the book in a mix of confusion and horror as he skimmed through. There were things in here he'd honestly forgotten about.

"This is what the Matrix is," Potter replied, his expression tired. "It's a fictional world to keep us quiet and complacent while the machines use us to power them. Our magic? It's not real. We just have a natural inclination for warping the fabric of the Matrix, so they picked this story to limit us and make sure we don't test the boundaries. We play out this story, over and over again, and when it ends, presumably, we start all over from the beginning, our minds wiped clean so we can assume the roles of older characters or something."

Potter picked up one of the books. "None of this is real."

This was insane. It was one thing to claim to be trapped in a dream and it was another to claim the world was destroyed, but to believe that everything he'd ever known and all his memories were not only were just a children's story but also a mental prison conjured by muggle machinery? It was too much.

Draco shook and started to shout at him, not really caring about the words because he needed to tell that bastard to shut up and stop lying. His parents loved him, they were real, his friends were real, magic was real, Potter was lying...

The next thing he knew, Draco was back in the metal room, pitching forward onto the floor as he vomited up water. The metal device in his arm stared at him, cold, blackened and ugly. Weakly, he curled up into a ball and began to sob.

AN: Harry was actually the hardest character to write in this chapter - he didn't want to shut up and it kept becoming more obvious as I wrote him that the truth of the Matrix and his place in it crushed him and his sense of self. Hopefully, I managed to get that to come through in the way he speaks and moves.

I'm actually quite surprised there's been some renewed interest in this story.