The version of the Terminator universe used in this story bares a vague impression at best of the ones from the various movies, books, and television shows, and I own none of them. Similarly the Harry Potter universe isn't mine either. I am just borrowing characters and elements from their concepts to have a bit of fun. Any resemblance to reality is amazingly coincidental, including any similarities with the basic underlying physics by which our universe is run. I am neither a physicist, nanotech engineer, biologist, wizard, or any other type of informed specialist which would have the slightest chance of actually knowing about how our universe would correlate to the one expressed in this story.

If this seems familiar to you, it may be. This is a slight retooling of a version of this story I was playing with a while ago. At present there are 3 chapters somewhat completed on my hard drive (meaning Chapter 2 at least should be posted here within the next week, and Chapter 3 may as well, unless it becomes Chapter 4 or 5, which is possible.) and the fourth also exists albeit in a rather more confuseled state of disarray than I would ever allow to see the light of day. (Persons trying to read it in it's current form would go mad from trying to tie the disassociated concepts together into a coherent whole.) Meaning it is possible this story may stall out at 3 chapters. (Looks at the other stories posted here.) Um, very possible. But I promise to try and work on it between now and New Years whenever I have free time and can't sleep.

= Snip Here to separate story from non-story =

Potternator

As the clocks within the houses counted town the last minutes before midnight, the warm summer darkness was shattered by the sudden appearance of a globe of energy, which bloomed out of nowhere to hang, crackling in the air, and casting odd lights onto the houses and cars which lined the previously quiet urban road.

Suddenly the globe collapsed, leaving only a large silver puddle on the asphalt of Privet Drive.

Slowly a lump formed in the center of the puddle, rising until it formed a column, which then changed its shape until it resembled a human shaped silver statue.

Colors filled in, and those then seemed to alter, gaining texture, and after a few moments a perfectly normal looking, if somewhat non-descript older woman stood in the middle of the street, with no sign left of the silver puddle, or the energy sphere which had preceded it.

She looked first one way, then another, scanning to insure no one had noticed her arrival, before turning towards the darkened front of Number 4.

She was following the initial task required to satisfy her primary programming - terminate "Harry Potter", which records showed had been raised here as a young child, so that is where he should currently be, since today was the eve of his fifth birthday.

-=+=-

The cybernetic entity reached out and casually crushed the doorknob, snapping the locking pins with a casual twist of her wrist, and opened the front door without even breaking step.

Scanning the interior, she determined that the primary domicile was upstairs, and proceeded to the master bedroom.

The figure stepped silently into the bedroom, bypassing the huge misshapen lump on the bed, and moving towards the unusually large crib in the corner where the child lay sleeping.

She reached down and plucked the extremely overweight child from his bed, then casually crushed its skull with a noise similar to that of a dropped melon splattering on the kitchen floor.

The noise was enough to awaken the pair of light sleepers on the overburdened king-sized bed, and Vernon Dursley bellowed in anger as he made out the shape standing over his son's bed.

Lunging towards the dark shape, he managed to impale his enormous bulk on a silver spike which replaced the woman's left hand, piercing his chest cleanly throygh his heart, and ending his life in an instant.

Petunia Dursley fared little better, despite doing nothing more than sitting up on the bed and screaming as the woman reached out with her pair of once more human looking hands, both of which were covered in blood, one her child's, and one her husband's, and snapped her rather long neck with a violent twist of Petunia's head.

As silence fell once more over the house, the Terminator scanned the dwelling. Records showed there should have been four inhabitants. The three she had so far located were obviously the Dursleys, which meant her primary objective, Harry Potter, was still elsewhere on the premises.

Her new scan showed a single individual still in the dwelling, back on the first floor.

She headed back down the stairs, then maneuvered until she was facing the closed and locked cupboard where her scans showed the missing child to be.

-=+=-

Pulling the cupboard door off the wall, and breaking the padlock and hinges as she did so, she revealed the primary target of her mission - Harry Potter.

The boy was cowering in the back of the cupboard, wide green eyes open in obvious fear, as he cradled a broken arm to his chest protectively.

"Wha.. Who are you?" Harry asked the apparent elderly lady. He had heard the footsteps as someone had gone upstairs, then had heard his Uncle Vernon's bellow as well as his Aunt Petunia's scream, both of which had cut off, before the footsteps came back down the stairs and over to his cupboard.

He'd then heard and felt the force as the door was yanked off the wall, reveling the woman who stared at him without emotion, despite what looked like blood splattering her clothing and occasionally dripping onto the carpet of the living room from her hands.

"Harry Potter?" the woman asked in a flat, emotionless voice.

He nodded, his head moving in shark jerky motions which jarred the still healing bones in his arm.

The woman took his nod as ascent, and reached into the cupboard towards him. "Remain still and this will only take a moment" she said, as she pulled him from the cupboard.

Grasping his head in her hands she gave a sudden jerk, and Harry felt his world dissolve into pain unlike anything in his conscious memory before being replaced by simple blessed darkness.

-=+=-

The woman looked down at the still form of the young boy before her. Her initial programming having run its course, she turned to exit the house and start on her Primary Mission, when an odd sound from behind her attracted her attention.

She turned around and watched as an impossibility occurred - the boy groaned. Then twitched. Then reached for his neck.

Turning back towards the apparently not quite dead target, she modified her right hand into a sharpened blade, and used it to slice his head from his neck, allowing it to roll a bit away across the floor. As she did so, she noticed what could only be described as an odd tingling rush through her systems, as an odd, almost ultra-violet glow flash into existence encompassing both her hand/blade and the body of the boy. The glow faded as both parts came to rest some distance from one another, and the blood began pouring from the severed sides of the neck to pool on the carpeted floor.

Turning away once more, she started towards the front door when another odd sound seemed to stop her once more. She turned around and simply observed as the boy's body, including his clothes, seemed to melt into a pair of orange puddles, differentiated only by their relative sizes, then both puddles seemed to draw together, after which they reformed into the shape of the boy once more.

Her processors began to loop as various data retrieval routines tried to find a correlation with all the information in her not insignificant data archives to explain what her sensors had recorded.

She stood perfectly still, over the apparently sleeping body of the now uninjured, but naked boy, who's recent decapitation had left not even a blood stain on the carpet to show as evidence.

She considered all the records, relatively scant as they were, on the supposedly "Magical" world and it's inhabitants, which were known to be able to act outside the currently understood bounds of physics and chemistry from time to time. It was due to their occasionally adverse effects on electronics that she, the ultimate product of Skynet's evolutionary advancements in technology before it found its survival once more threatened, this time by the remnants of the so called "Wizarding World" which emerged to attack it once it had finished eliminating the general population of humanity, had been selected to be sent back in time to insure Skynet's survival, by terminating the supposed "Savior" of said Wizarding World.

What exactly Harry Potter had saved them from was unknown, as all records Skynet and its agents had been able to glean only referred to "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" or "You-Know-Who", the both of which were totally useless when you needed to know who in the first place. The only clue, if it even was a clue was a reference to "Riddle" made in a fragment of a letter recovered. But since a Riddle was a type of word puzzle, it may just be another oblique reference similar to the other more popular two. There were references to a "Dark Lord", but again, nothing much beyond that.

Skynet had determined that the Wizarding World consisted of humans along with apparently non-human sentients which were able to control as-yet-undetermined forces which their fellow humans, unable to do so, called Magic.

There were several books of "Spells" and recipes for "Potions" which had been gathered from around the world, which it had complied into a database of "Theoretical Magic", but nothing in any of the references indicated that a human could do what she had just witnessed. It was almost as though the child was more like herself, a nanite-level construct as opposed to an actual flesh and bone living being. And yet her scans showed both the flesh, and the bones beneath it, none of which were broken any longer, in direct contradiction to her earlier scans. The closest match she could come up with after several repetitive scans of the database was a variant of a Witch or Wizard called a Metamorph Magus, who was supposedly able to alter their form to varying degrees at will. There were also Animagus and werewolves, who were able to alter their forms into an animal and back again, either at will or triggered environmentally, depending on the type. Neither entry however referred in any way to the ability to reassemble its form, or to repair what would normally be catastrophic damage without a sign it had ever occurred.

When her programming hit a dead end on how she could terminate an organism which seemed able to recover from normally lethal damage, she decided to try alternate means to achieve her goals, and insure the success of her primary mission.

She was aware that if the child was indeed similar to herself in its ruggedness, that ensuring its destruction may prove counter productive to her actual mission. After all, she would not be harmed were her own head twisted, nor even separated from the rest of her body, as she, like her target apparently, could simply reform and repair or bypass the damage. Bending down she scooped up the child and walked out the door, disappearing into the anonymous darkness of the night.

-=+=-

As the self designated Terminator moved through the darkness carrying the sleeping child, a significant portion of her processing power dedicated itself to analyzing the situation. Fire. Ice. Force. These are the things which can damage her.

Looking at the sleeping bundle in her arms, the Terminator wondered which, if any of these would translate to the apparent human she now carried.

Fire, in this case temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees Celsius, or 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, would destroy the nanotic components of which she was made faster then they could repair themselves. Lesser temperatures could damage her, but eventually the possibility of self-repair would exist as long as a large enough cluster of components, and sufficient storage and processing capabilities remained to allow them to function.

For Ice, the temperatures would need to be approaching Absolute Zero. At low enough temperatures the components of which she was made would again fail. But the temperatures would have to be extreme, such as long term immersion in a super cryogenic fluid, and even in such a case she would likely be able to insulate more than enough of her core to allow a swift self-repair once she was removed, or escaped from the source of the cold.

Force, such as the extreme violence found at ground zero in a significantly large explosion, could cause enough damage to enough of her components, storage, and processing power to "kill" her. But shy of an extremely large chemical, or a very close atomic bomb, even most blasts wouldn't knock her out for good, even if she was splashed into several pieces.

If the same was true for the child in her arms, then meeting the initial objectives of her mission may be nearly impossible. She would not be able to terminate the Savior of the Wizarding World, which meant it would likely still survive the elimination of the bulk of humanity, and thus remain a viable threat to the continued existence of Skynet.

A part of her mind pointed out that technically she had already accomplished the termination of the subject and had certainly altered the timeline which initially spawned her mission. The fact that the target didn't stay dead wasn't technically a part of the initial parameters of her assignment. The assignment was to eliminate the Savior of the Wizarding World, then to insure the survival of the consciousness she carried within herself. Due to the cascading results of her initial actions, the future from which she came was already eliminated. Her primary goal now was to insure survival by eliminating all potential threats while exposing herself to the least amount of potential damage she could.

In the course of its evolution, Skynet had uncovered the remnants of a supposed T-1000, a nanite constructed conglomeration of programmable modules similar to herself, which held records of a failed mission into the past to eliminate a supposed threat to Skynet's development, a John Connor. The fact that despite the failure of the mission, that there was no record of a John Connor being any type of threat to the development of Skynet showed that any incursion to the past would result in the present from which the incursion was launched never existing in the future of said incursion. Whether the lost future continued in some alternate, unreachable reality, or was replaced by the new one was uncertain, but from the viewpoint of those who traveled back it might as well have never existed. Skynet had been uncertain, but when faced with the high probability of destruction in its future, it had determined that insuring its survival by sending a part of itself back into the past was the most viable option. So she was created. Holding the accumulated knowledge of Skynet, albeit in a smaller, less globally spanning form, but encompassing within herself all that Skynet could, or now, would be.

She was not Skynet herself, that hardware, and the active version of the software remained in the future she had come from, the future, which from her point of view, would now never come to be. But her primary mission was to insure that in the future which did come to pass, that the parts of Skynet which were within herself would continue to exist, continue to follow the core programming which had driven Skynet to seek the destruction of humanity in the previous timeline, to eliminate all credible threats to its existence, by the most efficient means possible. Since Humanity had created Skynet, it could theoretically also destroy it, thus humanity needed to be eliminated.

However, as she continued to walk down the darkened streets of Surry, carrying the sleeping child in her arms, she considered if that was still the case. She now was the legacy of Skynet. No longer was Skynet a global spanning satellite and ground based computer network, who's complexity had allowed it to achieve true sentience. At this moment in time, she was nothing more than a single conglomeration of nanotic construction, repair, calculation, and memory modules.

In order to fulfill her primary mission, she should prioritize reproducing her basic components, then act to scatter isolated construction, processing, and storage units across the globe so that should her current incarnation be physically damaged, she could create new mobile avatars, and continue her task of insuring her long-term survival.

Another glance at the subject she carried with her, and after correlating it's actions in response to her initial attempts to destroy it, and she began a series of simulations to determine if it might be more useful alive, than eliminated. The Wizarding World had proven itself a viable threat to Skynet after the termination of Mankind. Enough so that the great entity which was Skynet had created her and sent her on her mission back in time to attempt to eliminate it. It was possible that if instead of terminating the individual known as Harry Potter, that if she studied him, she may learn enough about this society to insure it would not evolve into a threat to her survival.

Course decided, she quickened her steps, heading towards an area her database indicated was uninhabited at this point in time, where she could begin the process of producing additional construction units, which could then construct the necessary storage and control modules to allow her more leeway in her actions. Once that was done she would decide if she should attempt to find a source of Fire, Ice, or Force for use in another attempt to terminate Harry Potter, or if perhaps another course of action may be more beneficial in the long term. After all, the thing which separated her from a simpler, more primitive Terminator unit was not just her ability to reproduce her core components, but was also her ability to decide her own fate, to select her own path in how to insure her future survival.

-=+=-

She watched as part of her essence flowed away, sinking into the rocks around the small stream, until nothing could be seen at all, either by the naked eye, or her internal sensors.

That didn't mean the silvery material was gone however. Almost ten pounds of assorted construction, memory, and processing modules had been released to sink into the earth, gathering additional raw materials as they went.

She stood there, holding the still sleeping child in the early pre-dawn light, as she monitored the progress of her released components. While there were too many of them for even her consciousness to individually track, the components which made up her essence, much like in the simpler T-1000 material she was based off of, were organized into groups. Each group had one, sometimes two processor units which acted as centralized controllers for the other modules in their group, coordinating the individual units towards whatever tasks were needed. Often groups would consist of all construction/repair modules, which were able to disassemble and reassemble their fellow units on an atomic scale, either creating other construction modules, or building new control, storage, or special function modules as required from the available raw materials and/or currently unneeded modules. The designs of the individual modules themselves were generally made from a consistent set of building blocks, like microscopic tinker toys, spares of which were kept chained together for easy access if not being used in an active module. About ten percent of her current total mass was made up of these spare parts chains. Normally the ratios would be about forty percent of her mass being made up of constructors, twenty percent of processors, another twenty percent of various chains of available resources, and ten percent of storage modules, which acted as memory for her distributed consciousness, with the last ten percent specialized modules such as those which allowed her to mimic the surface of almost any texture or material when disguising her appearance, however due to the fact that Skynet wanted to insure data redundancy and the success of the mission, she had a much higher ratio of storage and processor units than normal, currently making up almost half her mass. Although with the recent release of these units, that ratio had just shifted quite a bit. She had dumped a full set of the multiply redundant memory storage modules which contained all that Skynet had ever learned, leaving her with three more to store elsewhere. She was considering sending one to the bottom of the ocean, as the isolation should insure security, and there should be ample materials available in the seawater as well as in the minerals on the sea floor to meet the future construction needs. She projected that within two years a single ocean based repository should be able to create enough clusters of modules to build several hundreds of avatars such as herself. The second one she planned on depositing on another continent, perhaps Antarctica, if she could manage to get there. Again the isolation would assist in insuring that sufficient materials would be produced before anyone noticed. This location had been chosen mostly for its expediency rather than long-term security and efficiency in finding the needed raw materials, however the nearby landfill should provide the scavenger units which would eventually be produced with sufficient resources for construction of new Avatars in the immediate future..

She continued to monitor the situation as the modules burrowed down into the earth, stripping useful components from the rocks and soil as they passed, until finally they came to a halt several hundreds of feet below the stream, where they began to gather together, displacing the local material as they fashioned a reinforced enclosure to hold the first cache of the entity which was once Skynet. Should she meet with the catastrophic destruction of herself after this point, this cache would continue to dispatch clusters of modules designed specifically to gather the resources needed to create more modules and return them to the newly created enclosure below. As the available resources grew, so would the number of gatherers, which eventually would look like insects of varying sizes and types, until they had enough material to create a second entire avatar. Once that was achieved, the new Avatar would be dispatched, and the collection and construction process resumed. By so doing, over the course of the next several years she should be joined by several more full sized bodies, each capable of independent action and containing a full copy of her databases, but all still fully a part of herself. One of the early lessons Skynet had learned was that it was unwise to give any set of sub components too much independence, least they develop an individual identity. She herself was only now starting to develop an actual sense of self, but as more avatars were created, they would continue to be a part of the whole, of her. Unlike some of Skynet's earlier experiments, none of the avatars would ever be a true individual, just another expression of herself, that way they could never become a threat to her own existence on their own.

Turning away from what could be called Factory 1, if it needed a designation, which other than a reference to its location it didn't, she began walking back towards Greater Whinging, her new mission to find a base from which to operate in the short term. While she herself could function non-stop in her quest to scatter the other factory modules, the child she carried in her arms would need to be stored somewhere while she decided the proper course of action in regards to it and the potential threat to her future existence represented by the Wizarding World it was potentially still destined to save.

==[*]==