The November wind already carried with it the biting chill of winter.
One weekend, outside the stone walls of Hogwarts Castle, the sky was overcast, heavy with leaden-gray clouds pressing low overhead.
On such an ordinary, unremarkable day, Alan Scotts twelfth birthday quietly arrived.
He made no announcement, nor did he expect any form of celebration. Yet when a large parcel, delivered by owl, landed with a heavy thud on the table in the Gryffindor common room, the weight of that gift from his distant family stirred a faint, long-lost warmth deep in his heart.
He carried the package back to his dormitory.
Fred, George, and Lee Jordan immediately crowded around with curiosity.
"Open it, Alan! Let's see what your parents sent you!"
"My guess—an entire year's supply of Dungbombs! Enough to flood the whole Slytherin common room!"
"Oh, come off it, you two. I bet it's a brand-new broomstick—definitely something flashy!"
Under three pairs of eager eyes, Alan tugged apart the twine and brown wrapping paper.
The dormitory fell silent in the very next second.
Inside, there were no shrieking prank toys, no gleaming Quidditch gear, not even the shadow of a Chocolate Frog.
What lay inside was a heap of cold, silent fragments—metal and plastic parts of strange shapes, radiating a harsh, industrial aura utterly alien to the wizarding world.
"What… is this stuff?"
Lee Jordan's face mixed deep confusion with disappointment. He stretched out a finger and gingerly poked at a green circuit board studded with dense chips. The icy touch made him recoil at once.
"Some kind of Muggle torture device? For pinching fingers?"
The Weasley twins exchanged looks, circling the pile twice, searching for any trace of "fun." But in the end, all they saw was an incomprehensible heap of "scrap metal."
Alan's reaction, however, could not have been more different.
His breath caught for an instant.
The moment his eyes landed on the parts, his entire presence changed. His fingertips trembled—not with fear, but with a suppressed, almost painful excitement.
He ignored his friends' mutterings, his gaze locked onto the green board etched with intricate silver patterns. In the depths of his pupils, two flames ignited, burning brightly enough to banish the dormitory's gloom.
It was a set of personal computer components.
In the Muggle world of 1991, the DIY computing craze was just beginning. And what he held here was undoubtedly the latest and most complete kit available.
His eyes shifted to the side. There lay a textbook as thick as a castle brick.
On its cover, printed in calm yet powerful lettering, was the title:
"C Programming: From Beginner to Mastery."
This was the birthday gift he had requested by letter—specifically from his father, who was just as much a "tech enthusiast" as himself.
"This is no scrap metal."
Alan's voice quivered slightly, though he didn't notice it. His hand stretched out, as tenderly as if he were touching a priceless treasure. His fingertips slowly caressed the square surface of a CPU chip.
That icy metallic texture, through the nerves of his fingers, seemed to etch itself straight into his soul.
He raised his head. In his eyes blazed a light his friends had never seen before—bright, fervent, almost fanatical.
"This… is another kind of magic."
While Fred, George, and Lee Jordan looked on in blank incomprehension, Alan gathered up the pile of parts that, in his eyes, were more precious than any magical artifact.
The entire afternoon, he shut himself away in the Room of Requirement.
On the seventh floor of the castle, in front of the tapestry, he focused his thoughts: a workshop where I can assemble intricate Muggle creations.
A door appeared.
Beyond it lay a space beyond imagination.
Bright shadowless lights poured down from the ceiling. A broad, spotless metal workbench stood in the center. The walls were lined with screwdrivers, tweezers, soldering tools of every variety.
The air held a faint scent of oil and resin.
He set aside the thick textbook and drew in a deep breath, devoting himself not to his increasingly complex "spell-programming," but to something far bolder, far more revolutionary—
Using magic to power Muggle technology.
He began assembling. His hands were steady, precise, every motion refined by countless rehearsals inside the palace of his mind. The CPU was carefully placed into its socket, the latch snapping shut with a crisp click. RAM slid neatly into its slot. Hard drive, graphics card, sound card—one by one, each component settled into place like soldiers returning to formation.
At last, when the final data cable was connected, a computer tower stood on the workbench—imbued with retro elegance and industrial strength.
Then came the greatest obstacle.
Power.
He looked around. The Room of Requirement had provided him with every tool he could think of—except a single Muggle wall socket.
Hogwarts, this ancient magical castle, rejected all forms of Muggle electricity.
Give up?
That word had never existed in Alan's dictionary.
He stood in silence for a moment. Inside his Mind Palace, high-speed calculations, formulas, magical principles, and energy models collided, broke apart, and recombined.
Finally, his gaze fixed on one of the most basic spells—something nearly every first-year could do.
The Lighting Charm.
He drew his wand and pointed it at a length of copper wire he had stripped from an old cable.
What he sought was not simply a brief glow, but the reverse engineering of the spell's energy structure—transforming the raw, chaotic magical energy inside him, channeling it through his wand as a "converter," and refining it into the industrial cornerstone of modern civilization: electric power.
From there, the copper wire would carry it into the fragile, sensitive power module of the computer's motherboard.
It was a mad idea.
And an incredibly precise, dangerous task.
The magical output had to be controlled to the tiniest fraction. Even the slightest fluctuation—just a microsecond of instability—would turn his father's carefully chosen, precious gift, delivered across two worlds, into nothing more than a smoking pile of charred wreckage.
The first attempt.
He fed a thin thread of magic into the copper wire.
Pop!
A soft sound. One of the motherboard's capacitors released a wisp of smoke, the air filling instantly with the acrid stench of burning.
Failure.
He immediately cut off the flow of magic. A bead of cold sweat trickled down his temple.
But he did not despair. Instead, he closed his eyes, replaying every detail of the magical current in his mind, analyzing the cause.
"Output too high. Voltage spiked instantly…"
He adjusted his approach, shifting from steady "direct current" to a gentler, pulsed rhythm.
The second attempt.
Bzzzt…
A small spark jumped at the end of the copper wire. The connected monitor flickered for a heartbeat—then went black again.
Failure, once more.
"Frequency mismatch. Needs higher-frequency modulation…"
Once.
Ten times.
Dozens of times.
All afternoon, the hidden chamber resounded with faint crackles of sparks and Alan's restrained breathing. His face grew pale from magical exhaustion, yet his eyes shone ever brighter, his focus sharper.
At last, as the simulated sunset outside the Room of Requirement faded, a miracle occurred.
He raised his wand once more, pressing it to the copper wire.
This time, the magic flowing from within him was no longer a rushing torrent, but threads of energy—precise, crystalline, pure as glass—segmented and modulated by his will.
They pulsed in perfect rhythm, feeding steadily into the motherboard's power connector.
The computer on the workbench gave a faint whirr.
The cooling fan began to turn.
The monitor hummed, then suddenly lit up.
After a blink of darkness, a green line of text—retro, simple, beautiful—appeared in the center of the screen:
C:\
It lasted less than a second before a tiny fluctuation in his magic cut the power and the screen went black.
But that was enough.
Alan swayed, nearly collapsing. He braced himself on the cold metal table, panting heavily. Exhaustion washed over him like a tide, yet he laughed.
A true, unrestrained laugh echoed in the empty room.
He had succeeded.
That fleeting moment wasn't just about lighting a screen.
It was a historic breakthrough.
He had proven, undeniably, that magical energy and electricity could be transformed into one another.
And with that, his grand, world-shaking vision—the project of "Magical Programming"—had taken its first and most crucial step.
That evening, Alan returned to the dormitory.
Though weary, his spirit burned with exhilaration. He set down the small birthday cake his mother had sent and divided it among his three roommates, who still looked utterly baffled by the so-called "scrap metal."
"Alan, you spent the whole afternoon sneaking off—what exactly are you doing with that stuff?" George mumbled around a mouthful of cake.
Alan didn't answer right away.
He walked to the window, gazing into the night. The velvet sky was scattered with countless, brilliant stars.
"I was thinking…"
His voice was quiet, dreamlike—more a murmur to himself than a reply.
"If I can use magic to drive this machine…"
He paused, turning to his friends' confused faces.
"…then perhaps I can also use this machine's cold, absolute logic to command, regulate, even reshape the untamed forces of magic."
"Imagine it."
In his eyes, the starlight blazed brighter than the heavens outside.
"A future where we no longer chant those obscure incantations, no longer wave our hands through those cumbersome motions.
"A future where all it takes is sitting at a keyboard, tapping out lines of code—
"…to cast spells more complex, more precise, more powerful than any wizard alive."
The vision crashed into the quiet like a stone into still water.
Fred, George, and Lee Jordan stared at him, cake halfway to their mouths, utterly dumbstruck.
Lost.
Confused.
Awed.
~~----------------------
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