Although this is a story about the future, it holds its roots - like most stories tend to do - in the past. It opens in 1952: in the same year an atomic bomb is detonated off the western coast of Australia in Operation Hurricane and the New Music Express published its first list of the top-selling singles in the United Kingdom, a boy named Harold is born. He is in many ways unremarkable, and remains so throughout his whole life, but it is nevertheless with him this story begins, at a time when Harold is a boy of twelve and watching the evening news with his father on their black-and-white television. The piece on the news is about how Beatlemania has crossed the Atlantic and made it to America, and Gordon Granger, Harold's father - who is a stern though not unkind man - scoffs at the piece, at the four boys from Liverpool with their long hair, just like he did the year before when it seemed every radio would beg for the listener to pleeea-ea-ea-eeease, love me, do, followed by that blast of the harmonica. Although Harold listens to what his father has to say, and nods and agrees, he cannot help but feel something stirring when he sees the newsreel footage of the girls that are screaming, whipped into a hysteria frantic enough to reach out through the television set and touch people in their living rooms - some deep and unnameable feeling that is powerful as it is inarticulate, and for the first time in his life, Harold thinks that perhaps his father can be wrong sometimes.

------------------

It's now the spring of 1973, and the boy that was Harold Granger has almost finished becoming a man. He is on his way from the university to a café a short walk away, a textbook and notepad under his arm and a swagger to his step as he explains why he stands up next to a mountain and chops it down with the edge of his hand, picks up all the pieces and makes an island (might even raise a little sand) - Harold is a voodoo child, Lord knows he's a voodoo child.

He is thinking of Katherine, who will no doubt be at the café already, having picked somewhere to sit that faces the door so she can see him when he gets there.

She is the woman who will later become his wife, and they will later have a child, a daughter, who will play a key role in the death of an immortal monster, but he does not know these things (and some, perhaps, he will never know completely).

What he does know, completely and certainly, is that in music there is something greater than just the lyrics and the instruments and anything else you can point to and name; there's almost something like a magical force behind it. Harold Granger's tiny one-room flat is filled with stacks of vinyls, and the record player spins them constantly while he reads his textbooks and chicken-scratch from lectures, making notes in the margins and pushing his NHS glasses up on the bridge of his nose, and he can do this for hours and hours.

It's the magic of the music. With it, he can be as cool - cool as Jimi Hendrix as he slides a finger down the neck and makes that dropping pow! sound no human mouth can reproduce, cool as Elvis, half rock-and-roll and half superhero in that bright red suit, just a hunk-a-hunk-a burnin' love, cool as John Bonham who played the drums so hard he broke the drumsticks and continued with his hands - and things like the end of Vietnam and the IRA car bombs in London don't matter so much, and life is good.

------------------

Six years later, Dutch electronics company Philips gives the first public demonstration of the Compact Disc, and the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Pennsylvania undergoes a partial core meltdown.

Roughly six months after these events, Harold and Katherine Granger become the parents of a baby girl. Katherine, whose taste in music is strictly limited to classical pieces (and not even the good kind, her husband will often add, stating that at least Beethoven has some kick to it), insists on a name drawn from classic myth; it is Harold who gives his daughter her middle name, after his own mother. When the girl is baptised, she is Hermione Jean Granger.

------------------

When this girl has grown and has become Hermione Jean Weasley, she gives birth to a daughter of her own named Rose into a world with more than thirty million iPods and a possibly nuclear North Korea.

------------------

In the year 2015, Hermione Jean Granger that was, daughter of Harold and Katherine, is working with George Weasley and Lee Jordan on a prototype portable device capable of receiving transmissions from the Wizarding Wireless Network.

The project began with Lee, who noticed the plastic buds in the ears of almost all of the people he saw during a three-month stint of having to travel on the Underground while his Apparition license was suspended.

After the concept of a portable media player was explained (and after he was able to assure the commuter he interrupted during peak hour that he was most certainly not from Mars), he immediately began thinking of a wireless shrunk down to that tiny size, tuned to the WWN. He pitched the idea to George, who later brought in Hermione owing to the headway she had made recently in developing a shielding technique that would guard electronic Muggle devices from natural decay around areas of concentrated magic, and the three of them were nearing having a working model.

The ad-hoc transmitter (an old record player which Hermione has modified) has only a single thing to test the transmission with - a slightly warped seven-inch single, borrowed from Hermione's father. It has survived a large purge of Harold's record collection when he re-bought many albums on compact disc and is one of the lucky few to dodge being put into storage (the only seven-incher to do so), and it is for the reason of physical size and size alone that Hermione took it from the shelf in her parents' house and asked to borrow it a while.

This is something she severely regrets, as in the following weeks she grows to hate the song imprinted on it and wishes repeatedly for some variety (it never once occurs to her, nor to wizard-raised George and Lee, that a second song is printed in the grooves on the other side). Not only because it has played constantly for almost a month, but also because she still cannot understand half the words and remembers very little beyond when the singer remembers when rock was young, he and Suzie had so much fun.

George, meanwhile, has memorised the song in its entirety almost immediately, and takes great delight in singing it, loudly, during rare moments of quiet, especially the falsetto lines composed of nothing but na-na-na-na-na which grate on Hermione's nerves. She knows she will be very glad when she hears the song through the tiny prototype receiver, and not from either the scratchy record or her tone-deaf brother-in-law.

Two days after Lee shouts from outside that he hears it, he hears it, come and listen, we got it, a nuclear device using enriched uranium smuggled out of Pakistan is detonated in a densely-populated Western city, leading to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty finally being adopted worldwide, and a push towards complete global nuclear disarmament.

------------------

So now we reach the point of the story where the roots have led us.

It is the year 2020, and Rose Weasley, daughter of Hermione, daughter of Harold, son of Gordon, stands with a heavy bag slung over one shoulder, still within the settlement of Hogsmeade but a little outside of the main areas students tend to congregate in, facing in the direction of the Shrieking Shack.

Beside her stands a boy named Callum, who has a bag of his own resting on the ground. Rose considers Callum her best friend, and Callum considers her his. She is a tall girl for her age, with a plain face and a length of brown hair tied nondescriptly at her neck; he is nearly a head shorter but much broader across, with a mop of black hair and a dozen freckles on his nose. Know what has happened before they came here in their third year attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and see them here now.

Rose is intelligent just like her mother, but possessed with a restlessness that prevents her from ever simply devouring whole tomes for their knowledge; instead she prefers to interrupt people with questions, and this practice has caused her to hate one phrase in the English language more than any other: "I'll tell you later." Rose is always wanting to know now. She excels in classes she finds interesting but has great difficulty concentrating during any lesson that doesn't grab her interest in the first five minutes. She is blessed with an overabundance of candor but not of charisma, and the combination of these two traits cause almost all of the student body (and many teachers) to find her too abrasive for anything but the most fleeting for conversations.

One of the few that does not see her this way is Callum Gillespie. He is ordinarily a soft-spoken boy, and behind his unassuming nature is an intellect equal to Rose's. Born to two thoroughly Muggle parents that have long since divorced, Callum lives with his father who, during summer and Christmas holidays, imposes lessons on his son about what he jokingly refers to as his 'mundane heritage'. These lessons are nothing formal; they are just information from a quiet and thoughtful man passed on to a quiet and thoughtful boy.

Callum's quiet nature gives him an insight into Rose, the way she acts, and why it annoys other people so much (although he doesn't yet have the right vocabulary to express these ideas - it is more intuitive): in her constant rush to know more, she is never quite aware that she is being subconsciously insulting by reacting to someone not as if they were a person but rather some animate font of knowledge. He understands, again in that intuitive way, that this is not her fault, and she will be much older before she realises how completely it is part of her personality, and she may never be able to curb it completely.

Callum is Rose's friend because he accepts her unintentional caustic nature rather than trying to avoid it; she is his because she will always listen when he speaks. Their friendship is almost a predestined thing: not the kind that is written in the patterns of stars, but the simpler kind of destiny that brings together people of like mind the same way gravity pulls leaves from the trees or magnets draw iron filings to attention.

Never do either of them give much thought to the infinite momentous hammer of time and all things past that draws them together. And why should they? Rose and Callum are, after all, just products of their parents and the parents before them, like the rest of us, and to be otherwise is tantamount to impossibility.

------------------

"Are you ready?" asked Rose, keeping her eyes on the Shack.

"Ready as I'll ever," Callum replied. "And you? We don't have all the time, right."

"Keep your shoes on," she said in a way that was meant to be cool and dismissive, but Callum could hear the smile in her voice as well as see it on her face. He hoisted his bag off the ground with a grunt of effort, and the two of them started towards the Shrieking Shack.

------------------

Rose had been inside almost a minute when the crash and following yell of surprise came from behind her, and with it she realised two things: one was she hadn't looked back to see how Callum was keeping up with her after they'd both broke into a run, laughing, when they were close enough to the Shack to see details like the dust-covered windows or the bird's nest perched oddly on the roof; the other was that he might have had some trouble climbing in through the window whose glass was spread in a neat spray on the ground outside.

A third thought that quickly followed these two was that Callum might have fallen on top of his bag somehow.

"You didn't break the box, did you?" She turned and headed back down the stairs she had just bounded up, two at a time, in her excitement.

Callum was dusting off his knees, and he gave her a look. His bag lay neatly on the ground. "I'm fine, if you were wondering. No nails in my toes or big bits of wood stuck in my hand." He would have continued, but saw Rose would likely ask him again, and said, "It's fine, I dropped it in before I-" but Rose was already on her knees and opening the bag.

"Hey! I said it's fine, you cret!" he exclaimed.

"Don't call me a cret unless I'm doing something cretful," Rose said, but her attention was focused on inspecting the box - an ancient portable turntable - for damage.

"You are doing something cretful," he retorted, and she ignored him, holding the turntable over her head to see the underside without risking the cover swinging free. Callum scooped to pick up the now-empty bag and began folding it end over end. "You can carry that around, it's abs heavy."

Rose stood and tucked the turntable under her arm; the process was somewhat awkward owing to its size. "It is not," she told Callum, grinning, "you're just suspect." He grimaced, and she added: "Abso-suspect."

"This whole place is abso-suspect," he said. "How solid are those stairs?"

Rose shrugged with her free shoulder. "Held me. But I'll wait at the bottom until you get up, if you want." Her serious face held longer than she could usually manage before cracking into a huge gleeful grin.

The grin started to infect Callum. "Cret," he called her.

"Wallie," she called him back, and dashed for the stairs, and he chased after her.

------------------

"I thought stuff like this didn't work well around magic," Callum remarked, and gestured with the cord in his hand. "Wires, batteries."

"It doesn't unless you shield it. My mum figured out how, it's a bit like a sustained counterspell, or something."

"Sort of like EM shielding."

"What's that?" She looked up at him.

"It's a Muggle thing," he said, and after a moment of thought, added, "It's kind of long."

"We've got time," she said, smiling, and went back to sorting the wires.

Callum was quiet for a moment as he organised his thoughts, and then asked Rose, "You know what a bomb is, right?"

She nodded without looking up.

"There was a kind of bomb made, years ago, called the H-bomb-"

"Does the H stand for anything?"

"Hydrogen," Callum said automatically, and anticipating the question added, "the chemical inside.

"Anyway, this kind of bomb was powerful enough to destroy cities. It would leave a big cloud of dust like a mushroom in the air, and you could see it from miles away. My dad, he showed me some films of it once, from when the scientists were testing the bomb out in the desert. They built whole fake buildings and things and then set the bombs off and came back to make notes on what happened in the explosion. With just shirts and shorts."

The way he finished sounded significant, and Rose wanted to ask why but was unable to think of how to phrase the question. After a moment, seeing it clearly on her face, Callum gave her the answer.

"With a bomb that size, it doesn't just blow up, right. It leaves radiation all over the place. It's like poison. All the people in those films, my dad told me, the ones doing the tests, they probably all died young. Because of the radiation. It makes your body... grow wrong, so you got lumps of poison in places like your lungs and your brain and your heart."

"Couldn't it be cut out?" Rose asked. "The growing-wrong parts."

"Not then. Nobody even knew about radiation then, either - it was years until the people started dying, and it took a while to figure out what had caused it."

Rose imagined briefly a crew of rotting skeletons dressed in summer clothes comparing their findings over piles of rubble, and it disturbed her in a way she was unable to instantly clarify. She realised she had stopped sorting the wires.

Callum spoke again, and his voice was softer. Slower. "There was this place, Chernobyl, in Russia, that's still radioactive today after thirty years. The Russian government sealed it up in concrete and nobody's allowed near it still."

"A bomb did that?" Rose's impression of 'years ago' had been measured in actual years instead of decades, and she had difficulty imagining a poison that stayed in the air for longer than she'd been alive.

"Chernobyl wasn't bombed," Callum said, and he had an expression Rose was familiar with: it came across his face whenever he realised he had been assuming whoever he was talking to was familiar as he was with the Muggle world. "It was a power station."

"For- for making electricity?"

"Right. The radioactive stuff in the bombs, it could power whole cities."

"That's..." Rose took a moment before finding a fitting description, and said in a murmur, "That's pretty fucked up."

"The world's pretty fucked up," Callum replied in a world-wise tone that didn't seem to fit his thirteen years.

"I guess so." In her mind was a giant smoky cloud that hung over a city, a combination of two things she had never seen but felt she could easily imagine: a mushroom cloud, and the Dark Mark. "Why would your dad tell you about stuff like that?" she asked.

"He thinks it's important, and I guess I agree with him." He shrugged. "To understand how the world got where it is, right." There was a long silence, and Callum broke it by asking, "Wasn't I explaining something?"

"Maybe," Rose said, "but I don't remember what."

------------------

Rose and Callum stood back and for a moment and observed their morning's work in the dusty, cobwebby second floor of the Shrieking Shack.

They had been searching for a WWN relay station; WWPs (Wizard Wireless Portables, a product of Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, developer George Weasley, co-developers Hermione Weasley and Lee Jordan), because of their incredible popularity, had necessitated a redesign of how the Wizard Wireless Network functioned.

Prior to the WWP, a single transmission could be made from any given magically-enhanced radio, and through the long-distance communication spells performed by the speaker and placed on every radio, the sound would travel a considerable distance (although a true consensus was never reached, there was a well-known tale of a wizard who crossed the French Alps with only his wireless for company).

When the Portable was released, it was an instant sensation - it quickly became the thing every school-aged (and many adult) wizards had to have, and it was quite a common sight to see signs posted in windows and propped on desks in stores that read 'WWP - sold out (so PLEASE don't ask)' for months to come.

This sudden popularity led to exposing a fundamental flaw in the magic of the WWN - with not just dozens of people listening at any given time but often hundreds (potentially in the thousands during really popular programs), the broadcast range was sometimes cut down as short as a few miles. It was George, Hermione, and Lee who came up with the solution to the problem they had inadvertently caused: relay stations, that would be imbued with spells similar to those of radios and WWPs, but would push any broadcasts along to other stations so any broadcast could span all of Britain even if everyone who owned a WWP was listening at the same time.

These relay stations were often placed in unobtrusive locations - the one that served Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, and the surrounding local area was located (as Rose and Callum found out) behind a tatty armchair in the Shrieking Shack. They had pushed the armchair aside and removed the wooden panel on the front of the relay station, exposing an array of small flickering lights, a number of empty wire ports (Callum had expressed surprise at such a Muggle design on a magical device; it was at this point Rose brought out the collection of cables from her own bag), and a seven-digit serial number engraved in large official characters. They had then spent the morning attaching cables between the relay station and the old turntable (the same turntable which had, five years ago, repeated over and over that crocodile rockin' was sometimes shockin' when your feet just can't sit still), trying to find the right combination that would not only send sound from the turntable out from the relay station but block out any other transmissions coming into that station, so that no matter how anyone's WWP was set, all they would pick up is whatever records Rose and Callum played.

"Solid?" Rose asked, her hands on her hips.

"Abs solid," Callum confirmed. "What time is it?" The boarded shutters of the windows managed to let some light into the second floor, but not enough to tell the time of day beyond 'between sunrise and sunset'.

"No idea," she said, "lunch time? I'm hungry."

"Me too," he said, though he only realised when he said it. After a moment of hesitation, he asked, "Why are we doing this?"

"Because it'll be great," Rose said, "nobody will know what's happening, they'll lose their shoes." She had a broad smile as she spoke, but it faded when she saw how serious Callum was.

"That's not it," he said, his voice flat. "You wouldn't lift stuff from your mum just to do something for gigs, right. You didn't even tell me what we were doing until we got here. So why are we doing this?"

Rose was silent for a long while. Then she said, as if it were a concept so well-established and obvious that disputing it would not only make a person look foolish but also possibly insane: "Because we can."

"Because we can?"

"Because we can," she repeated, "and because nobody else will. We'll do something that everyone will notice."

"That's easy, right," Callum said. He was smiling, but something about it felt a little dark, too. "All you have to do is something really fucked up, everyone will notice that."

"Yeah, but this is music," Rose insisted. "Music is the least fucked up thing ever."

That got Callum laughing, hard, and Rose joined him. "That's pretty good, right," he said after catching his breath.

"So is it a good enough reason?" She was teasing him.

"Good as ever." He planned not to rise to it. "Got some un-fucked up music in mind?" This made both of them smile again.

Rose picked up the record she had carried in her bag, borrowed from her grandfather and packed carefully against the side of her school trunk during its journey to Hogwarts, and slid it out of its sleeve.

------------------

At first, the students with earpieces from their WWPs hooked around their ear thought there was something wrong with what they were hearing, that some test sound (for that was what the oscillating noises sounded like) was being broadcast in lieu of regular music.

Looks were exchanged between the students that were listening to the WWN, a rapid silent communication spreading just one question: are you hearing this too? Those without earpieces in rapidly fished their own out of robe pockets or else borrowed from friends to hear what the commotion was about. Any thoughts about a test sound were dissipating with the addition of the guitar and were gone completely when Keith Moon rolled on the drums one minute in. The regular broadcast came back without fanfare four minutes after, and only two people knew just what had happened. They were in the Shrieking Shack, listening on their own WWPs as the message came through on every station - don't cry, don't raise your eye, it's only teenage wasteland - and they were smiling, laughing, dancing around the furniture, elated and elevated at their victory.


09-05-14