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Inspirational Science Fiction Speculative

Dr. Pablo Tonel had always found solace in the routine of his practice. In the heart of Buenos Aires, his days as a casualty doctor were marked by a familiar routine of rounds, diagnoses, and consultations. It was in the ebb and flow of his out-patient hours that he felt most at home in the world, performing the science of healing. Every patient, each ailment, carried with it a story, a link with the overwhelming effect of illness on human life. For Pablo, these stories were not outside his own experience. His father’s battle with migraine and his own struggle with lupus—these personal experiences had shaped his perspective as a physician. He was not merely treating bodies; he was healing lives.

One rainy Wednesday afternoon, after a particularly long shift at the hospital, Pablo found himself wandering into a second-hand store. He had no particular purpose for being there, just a vague sense that the smell of the place and the quiet corners would offer him the peace he needed. As he perused the shelves, a glint of metal caught his eye—an old, worn stethoscope tucked away between two thick medical texts. The leather straps were cracked, and the metal showed signs of age, its once shiny surface now dulled by years of use. Yet, there it was - something that reminded him of his profession.

Pablo lifted the stethoscope from the shelf, feeling the weight of it in his hands. It exuded a strange warmth, as if it possessed a beneficence, at once being the intermediary guardian between the doctor and the patient and wanting to be held. "Just a coleccionable," he told himself, but for a combination of reasons he bought it anyway. Pablo ran his fingers over the cracked leather, glancing at the shopkeeper with a half-smile. "It’s worn, and not exactly functional—how about half the price?" The shopkeeper hesitated, but Pablo’s calm assurance wasn’t the haggling of a businessman; it was the quiet confidence of a doctor who knew the value of tools, not in gold, but in hands that could heal. The shopkeeper, an older man with sharp eyes, leaned against the counter and smirked.

"Ah, not just any coleccionable, eh, Doc?" he said, folding his arms. "If you’re talking to it like that, maybe it’s worth more than you think."

After quite a pause, they settled at three-quarters of the asking price, an unspoken understanding passing between them. Pablo produced his debit card without further words, sensing that both men knew the stethoscope held a value beyond currency. As he left the shop with the stethoscope in hand, a tinge of nostalgia washed over him. It reminded him of his early days of graduating in medicine, when the aura of the promise of being a healer filled him with belief that the right diagnosis and the right treatment could fix anything, which he knew with rage was untrue as with his migraine.

Pablo absently fingered the worn leather strap of the stethoscope, his eyes tracing its aged metal edges. He didn’t know why he’d bought it, why it seemed to pull him from that peaceful store shelf. It was an ordinary instrument, really—nothing more than a coleccionable, albeit of medicine. But as placed it on the shelf in his office, a curious sense of anticipation stirred in him.

"Another one?" came Beatriz's voice over his phone, a familiar edge of amusement coloring her words. "What is it this time, a piece of U-tube?" Pablo smiled faintly, glancing over at his study bookshelf filled with medical textbooks and with one corner reserved for his science fiction collection. Stories of time travel and paradoxes fascinated him more than other sub-variants. "Just an old stethoscope," he replied, his tone neutral, his senses long accustomed to the penetrating meaning of her questions.

Beatriz laughed. "Be careful, Pablo. You’re starting to sound like Robert that patient of yours."

Her words echoed in his mind as he set the stethoscope down, a shadow of doubt creeping in. He had often lost himself in those stories, immersing in the what-ifs of bending time, perhaps a little too deeply. Yet here, in this moment, the line between fiction and reality was thinner than he'd admit.

In the following week, Pablo began wearing the old stethoscope during his out-patient shifts, replacing his modern one almost unconsciously. At first, it was nothing more than a novelty, a but soon, he noticed that patients seemed more at ease when he used it, as though the worn instrument acted as a bridge between them, lowering the barriers of formality and detachment. They opened up more readily, shared not just their symptoms but their fears and hopes.

One of those patients was Gisele, a single mother of two who had recently been diagnosed with a chronic illness. During a routine visit, Pablo placed the stethoscope against her chest, listening to the steady beat of her heart. But instead of the usual clinical detachment, Gisele, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, began to speak about her fears—not about her illness, but about her children. “I feel like I’m failing them,” she whispered. “I’m supposed to be their rock, and now I’m the one who’s crumbling.”

Pablo felt a lump form in his throat. He could hear more than the rhythm of her heart; he could feel the weight of her despair. “You’re not failing them, Gisele,” he said gently. “You’re teaching them resilience, strength, all that matters greatly. My father—he was sick for as long as...as I can remember. He wasn’t a burden to me. He taught me how to fight, how to survive.”

Gisele smiled through her tears. For the first time, Pablo saw a glimmer of hope in her eyes.

That stethoscope, once a relic of the past, had become not just a tool for diagnosing illnesses; it was a conduit for healing. He began to understand her phenomenal experience of having five children, how intertwined their physical ailments were with her emotional state of acceptance of men at a young age. The old stethoscope had become a key to unlocking her long-term reconciliation to her world which went no further than high school, and Pablo found himself drawn into her life in a way he had never been before.

But as the weeks passed, Pablo began to feel the weight of his patients’ struggles bearing down on him. He carried their pain, their fear especially, and losing them to their condition after they had left the out-patients'. Night after night, he lay awake in bed, replaying conversations, second-guessing his decisions, wondering if he had been there for them. The stethoscope, which had once brought him closer to his patients, now felt like a shackle.

Beatriz, his wife, saw a change in him. She noticed how he was pulling away from her, from their children, from the life they had built together. “You’re too immersed in their lives, Paul,” she said one evening as they sat together at the dinner table, the silence between them growing as they ate garlicky tomatoes and pork. “What about us? What about your lupus? You shouldn't eat that.”

Pablo knew she was right. He had always prided himself on being the medic who would never grow cynical, like his father, a paragon of virtue, but somewhere along the way, he had forgotten how to heal himself. The stethoscope, once a symbol of connection, had pulled him deeper into way of modernity and the facile hope of being someone as well as forgetting metabolic health yet notwithstanding in existential turmoil with his patients.

One night, as Pablo sat alone in his office, he received a call from the hospital. His former patient, a young man named Robert, had died from a preventable complication of his illness. Pablo had treated Robert for years, guiding him through the ups and downs of his condition. But somewhere along the way, Robert had slipped through the cracks, and now he was gone. Pablo felt the world crumble around him. The guilt was alleviated because training took this into account. Yet through some disconnect he replayed every moment, every conversation with Robert, wondering what he could have done differently.

In the aftermath of Robert’s death, Pablo confronted a painful truth: being a healer meant accepting the limits of his influence. He couldn’t save everyone. The stethoscope though, which had once represented hope, now impinged on his recent change like a reminder of his failures.

One late evening, as the rain pelted down outside his office, Pablo made a decision. He stood up, walked over to the shelf where he had placed the old stethoscope, and gently pulled it out from between the books. He wasn’t abandoning it, but he was choosing to let go of the false hope it carried. The stethoscope had taught him the invaluable lesson of compassion, but it was time to find balance. He needed to reconnect with his family; he owed it to himself, to the living.

What Pablo didn’t realize at that moment was that the old stethoscope was a remnant from a time long past—and perhaps a future not yet written. Then a week after Pablo had set the stethoscope aside, as he was locking up the hospital in Buenos Aires, he heard a noise on his phone picking up his home office acoustics from the shelf where the stethoscope sat. But as Pablo reached home via the new Subte Y line, the room seemed to shift. The walls blurred, and for a brief moment, the world around him vanished.

When the haze cleared, Pablo was no longer in his office. He stood outside the hospital in this city of his—but something was different. The buildings were taller, the cars sleeker, and the people moved with a precision that seemed almost unnatural. He glanced down at his Apple Watch, but the date on it was unfamiliar: September 27, 2072.

Pablo’s heart raced. How was this possible? He began to piece together a theory rooted in the two sciences he knew best: biology and neurology. The key to understanding this phenomenon, he thought, might lie in the strange old stethoscope he had found in the second-hand store. What if this stethoscope wasn’t just a simple relic, but a tool embedded with advanced technology, capable of manipulating the human brain’s perception of time and space? It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility (he posited carefully) that small-scale temporal shifts could be induced within the human brain under the right conditions. Pablo at first hypothesised that biology might one day tap into and neuro-link (he made it into a verb) in processes outside as in the world as in nature like bird navigation, so could that be the case?

The stethoscope might act as a device that manipulated such a world as he envisioned in his neurons to create an experience of time travel, or more accurately, a temporal perception shift. His brain might be "seeing" a version of the future while still anchored in the present, through this process.

This theory made sense to Paul, particularly as a doctor with a background in neurology nurtured by his father. The brain, after all, was an electrochemical system that constantly interpreted sensory data to create a coherent experience of reality. If the stethoscope could influence the brain’s electromagnetic fields then it could theoretically disrupt his brain’s perception of time, causing him to experience a future reality in vivid detail, as if he were really there.

But Pablo’s experience seemed far too concrete, too real, to be a mere hallucination. He had felt the coolness of the air, seen the precision in the movements of the people around him, and even touched the sleek metallic surfaces of the electric cars as they pulled up along the La Tipa-lined avenues of trees. His memory was that they usually came in white, and these were all cyberpunk shades which led him to consider temporal field manipulation. Recent advancements in medical science had shown the potential for electromagnetic fields to affect cellular activity, and the Retiro district certainly looked electric. Pablo theorized that if the stethoscope contained a highly sophisticated miniaturized temporal field generator, it could create localized distortions in spacetime, an actual temporary displacement of his mind into a different point in the future. Howsoever, in some way he did exist in this future version of his city.

As a scientist, Pablo knew this explanation was speculative, but it wasn’t outside the realm of scientific theory. The stethoscope’s design, which seemed antiquated on the surface, could mask its true nature as an experimental piece of medical technology, perhaps created by a future civilization or by an advanced research to do with physics and neuroscience.

This idea, though still filled with unknowns, gave Pablo a plausible framework to begin understanding his experience. What he had witnessed was a product of scientific advancement, perhaps rooted in a technology far beyond his time. His medical training, his understanding of human biology and physics, had laid the foundation for him to comprehend the impossible.

Pablo’s heart began to calm as he realized this. If his experience was tied to the stethoscope’s manipulation of time and space, then perhaps, with the right knowledge and the right tools, it was possible to control this phenomenon. The question now was not just how it had happened—but whether it could happen again. And, more importantly, how he could use this knowledge to advance both his practice and his humanity towards others.

All of this process happened in the space of a minute. Before he could fully process what was happening though, a voice called out from behind him. “Dr. Tonel?”

He turned to see a man standing waiting outside the hospital, come out from behind one of the La Tipa trees, with its iconic yellow flowers, he had not seen at first, who was dressed head to foot in yellow, a stranger, yet there was something familiar about him. The man smiled. “It’s good to see you again.”

“Again?” Pablo asked, his voice shaky. “I don’t even know who you are.”

The man’s smile widened. “Oh, but you do. You’re the one who gave me hope when I needed it most.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, metallic object. It was a stethoscope—a modern one, polished and sleek, but unmistakably familiar.

Paul’s mind raced. Could this man be... Robert? The patient he had lost years ago.

The thought seemed impossible, yet here he was—alive, well, and now a doctor. Pablo grappled with the memory of Robert succumbing to his illness, the weight of his death pressing heavily on him. But what if Robert hadn't truly died? What if his demise had only been an illusion?

Paul's mind churned, searching for a scientific explanation. One possibility surfaced: what if Robert had entered a state of suspended animation, his body preserved in a way that mimicked death? Advanced cryogenic techniques or a medically induced coma, perhaps designed by an experimental facility, could have allowed Robert to survive long enough to be revived in the future.

Or could Robert’ survival be tied to something even more abstract, rooted in dreams and hallucinations? Pablo recalled recent studies on lucid dreaming. Perhaps Robert or he himself had traversed the boundaries between life and death, only to reemerge, his neural pathways, or his own, somehow reconstructed.

Pablo’s mind reeled with the implications. If such a state existed, it meant Robert’s brain had traversed a place where time unraveled and rewound itself—and if he was correct, to a place he was only beginning to comprehend. Before he could ask, the world around him shifted again, the colors blurring, the sounds fading. And just as quickly as it had begun, the strange vision ended. He was back in his office, the stethoscope in his hand.

Pablo sank into his chair, his heart pounding in his chest. What had just happened? Was it a dream, a hallucination? Or had the stethoscope somehow shown him a glimpse of the future—a future in which his actions, his care, would be ideal and not worn down in ways he couldn’t yet understand, as some of his colleagues did with cynicism about the adversarial nature of the relationship?

He sat there for a long time, staring at the stethoscope, knowing that in part his wife's sympathy and in part his lucidity had changed everything. Not just his connection to his patients, but his understanding of time itself. The future wasn’t set in stone, but the choices he made—the compassion he showed—could ripple forward, shaping lives in ways he had never imagined.

With renewed clarity, Pablo stood up, placing the stethoscope back around his neck. It was no longer just a tool of the past. It was a key to the future—a future he was determined to make better.

September 26, 2024 00:50

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2 comments

Cathy Pagliara
17:02 Oct 04, 2024

I absolutely love your writing style! It is succinct and pulls you into the story. I was suggested to read this story via the critique circle. My favorite parts of the story were when you went into the feelings and thoughts of your characters, such as Gisele and Pablo's response. I loved the dinner scene with his wife because it felt very authentic. You really have dialogue perfected! Thank you for writing this story. Keep up the great work!

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15:24 Oct 03, 2024

Wow! Initially it seemed like you had stated your genres incorrectly. But as the story went on the twists and ideas flowed. A very thought provoking tale. I wish your MC and his brave conclusions every success. Brilliant story in line with the prompt.

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