Harry slept deeply that night and woke up late. By the time he came down to breakfast, the hall was full, and he found Ron and Hermione sitting with Casey, the exchange student from the United States. Casey was a short, quiet girl with long black hair that she wore in styles that tended to hide her face. "Poor self-esteem", opined Hermoine, the first time she'd seen her. And indeed Casey seemed to try her best to blend into the wall, dressing all in black and rarely speaking in class or to anyone at all.
But somehow Ron and Hermione had drawn her out this morning, as Harry sat down in the middle of an animated conversation.
"So, yes," said Casey, "we do magic rather differently over in the States. Especially in California." To demonstrate, Casey pulled a small matte green and black metal artifact from her cloak that looked like it could be an ammunition cartridge, covered with warning hologram decals and glyphs that glowed and danced over the surface of the unit. The device was small but apparently quite heavy. One side bore spray-paint stencil letters "HrCX 9900" and underneath that a smaller, stylized logo: "General Demonics, San Jose, CA, USA".
"Blimey," said Ron, "what in blazes is that? And how did you get it past Filch?"
Casey smiled and did not answer. She drew her wand and touched the device with the tip, saying "Help, About". Immediately the room grew darker, colder, and rolling storm clouds began to form near the ceiling. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed and a heavy, humid wind began to blow as a deep, powerful voice began "Since the Dawn of Time, Man has sought the Secret of Immor-"
Casey rolled her eyes and poked her wand at the device a second time, ignoring the curious looks from the other breakfasters. "Cut the PR, just give us a functional spec synopsis in basic voice and text." The voice and storm effects stopped immediately, replaced by a scrolling holographic text display floating above the device. A genderless, matter-of-fact voice read the contents: "The General Demonics HrCX 9900 series Personality Storage Device is a full-function, state of the art unit capable of indefinite preservation of a full wizard or muggle personality. Personalities may be stored in quiescent mode or active mode at up to 4X real-time. The 9900 series includes a wide range of virtual environments and is IEEE-1516 compliant, offering connectivity with a wide range of muggle and wizard information networks. A wide range of General Demonics peripherals are available ..."
"I think it's awful," Hermione interrupted, frowning. "Being a brain in a box, cut off from the rest of the world -- what kind of life is that?"
The HrCX continued, sounding almost miffed "... are available for additional modes of real-world interaction, up to and including tele-control of animate proxy entities to the legally allowed maximum extent."
Hermione interrupted again, beginning to get a bad feeling about all of this. "What does that mean, 'tele-control of animate proxy entities'?"
"K, stop," said Casey, withdrawing her wand. The HrCX 9900 shut up. "By the strict letter of the law, there's a wide range of mechanical and magical devices that can be controlled by someone inside of an HrCX. The magic ones are better, but they're still not as good as a real human body. But that's illegal.
"Of course, there are plenty of people who could care less about 'legal' and, there are a number of hacked black-market devices that will allow one to take control of a living, breathing human being.
"Or a not-so-living, not-so-breathing human being, too."