One Small Change

Dr. A was probably the most famous anonymous person in the world. There are plenty of published scientists who are little-known and content to be private, and then there’s Dr. A. The Nobel committee spent over a year before they found someone who was in contact with the brilliant polymath. All their searching was met with an immediate refusal. Dr. A was not going to be seen in public, nor did they want the committee’s attention.

Despite this, the anonymous doctor had authored and published no fewer than seventy-four peer-reviewed papers in twenty-two journals. Every publication came with the same stipulation: the publication must be made available to the public for free, and all of Dr. A’s work is released into the public domain. With new insights in Quantum Mechanics, Physics, Materials Science, Mathematics, Optics, Medicine, Artificial Intelligence, and Economics, Dr. A’s work had sent dozens of industries leapfrogging each other to ever greater heights.

It was the Ultra-resolution MRI analyzed by a medical AI in a quantum computer that found a clump of four cancer cells in my brain. Besides finding the cancer, the UMRI was capable of focusing its magnetic field to a single cell, destroying it and the chemical signal it would normally send on apoptosis.

 I discovered I had brain cancer, and it was eliminated in the same visit, all without any symptoms. Since then, I’ve had annual follow-up visits where the procedure has been repeated. The largest clump was the second year, with nine cells. This year was the second in a row that there were none.

That’s all a very roundabout way of saying that, thanks to Dr. A’s work, I’m alive. As such, I’ve made it my mission to meet the person behind the pseudonym and shake their hand.

I started my search with the former members of the Nobel Committee for Physics, trying to contact the person or people who had contact with Dr. A in the past. After getting the runaround with emails, letters, phone calls, and even the odd fax, I decided I’d have to talk to someone in person.

Where I’d gotten put off, shuffled or ignored over other communications media, in person I was simply stonewalled. The committee and its members, past and present, take the privacy of recipients and nominees very seriously.

I’d spent nearly a month in Stockholm and was preparing to admit defeat, when I was approached in a coffee shop. I’m not sure that “approached” is the right word. A small person in a rain slicker brushed past me, reached out with a delicate, russet hand, and left a calling card in my coat pocket.

There was nothing on the card aside from a phone number. I waited until I was in my hotel room to call.

“You are looking for Dr. A?” the distorted voice that answered the call asked.

“Yes, I am. I—”

“Why?” they cut me off.

“I just want to meet them and thank them. I’m alive because of—”

“UMRI, nascent glioma. Multiple diagnoses and treatments,” the voice said, “we know. Is that all?”

“Is that all?!” Try as I might, I couldn’t keep my frustration out of my voice. “I want to meet the person who gave me the last nine years of my life, and every year that’s still to come after. I don’t care if I never learn their name or anything else about them. I just want…” I tapered off as realization hit.

“What is it you want?”

Brutal honesty was the tactic I chose. Not so much for the voice on the phone, but for myself. “I want to sit in the presence of someone so far beyond my intellect and just soak it in. It would be like being in the presence of a god.”

“You consider Dr. A a god?”

“No, that’s hyperbole. But I really do idolize them as humanity’s greatest modern benefactor. Dr. A is my sole hero.”

“Never meet your heroes.” The voice on the other end was quiet for a moment, then said, “If you want to continue your quest, call this number after you clear customs at Bagdogra airport.” There was nothing further as they hung up.

I spent the last week I had booked in Stockholm applying for an e-visa from India, picking it up at the Indian embassy, booking my flight to India, and canceling my flight home. At the recommendation of the woman at the Indian embassy, I also applied for and received an e-visa for Bhutan, since I’d be right there. Contrary to what I’d heard, it wasn’t difficult or expensive in the least.

I spent every moment I was out and about looking for the small person that had slipped me the card, but never saw them again. For just a moment, I thought maybe it was the woman at the embassy, but her nails were long, and her hands stained with faded henna. The hand that slipped the card into my pocket had neither.

I don’t know what I expected, but Bagdogra airport could’ve been any modern airport anywhere in the world. Some part of my mind was expecting something more…exotic, I guess. Ny unconscious bias leaking through.

When I called the number, the distorted voice answered on the first ring. “Your car is waiting,”

Considering what the voice on the phone knew about me already, it was no surprise that they were waiting for me as I arrived. I made my way out of the terminal and found a chauffeur standing in front of an old Toyota off-road truck with no top. The dissonance of the bespoke suit and pristine driving gloves of the tall man holding a sign with my name in front of a rugged, dented, and decidedly dirty truck did my head in. It seemed that my trip kept getting stranger by the minute.

He held the door for me, placed my single suitcase in the back, and gave a slight bow. The driver I hadn’t noticed, on account of her small stature, fired up the truck and we pulled into traffic as though we were racing to a fire.

After fifteen minutes in traffic, she turned onto a dirt road and sped up. Where I’d felt she was a dangerous driver before, now I thought she might be suicidal. No matter what I said, she never responded. I took the time to look at her hands. This might be the person that slipped me the card.

As the road disappeared and she drove through woods heading north, I watched her. There was something about the way she moved that convinced me she was the one.

I waited for a moment where the ground was a little smoother and the truck wasn’t rattling so much to say, “Thank you. … For slipping me the card, I mean.”

I couldn’t see her face, as there was no rear-view mirror, but I thought I saw her nod, just a little. It wasn’t until we finally stopped in front of a small house in the middle of nowhere that I thought about where we might be. The script on the door of the house was not like those I’d seen in India.

“We could’ve crossed at the official border,” I said, “I have a Bhutanese visa.”

The driver said, “I don’t. Neither does the doctor.” She got out of the truck and waited. There was to be no white-glove treatment here. I got out of the truck and grabbed my suitcase from the back. The dust of our off-road trip coated her face, and — I suspected — mine.

I followed her to the house, where we washed our hands, arms, and face in the icy water from a well pump. Following her lead, I took my shoes off on the small porch and followed into the house, dimly lit with a kerosene lamp in the deepening evening.

There, in an unassuming house in Bhutan, I met Dr. A and promised to keep their identity secret. They called the driver “Deva” even though I was assured that was not her real name.

The three of us had spicy chicken stew and red rice lager and talked into the wee hours of the morning. Both Deva and the doctor had done even more traveling in the previous weeks than I, and we were both out of whack with the local time, which made for a long conversation that began pleasantly enough.

What came next, however, soured the mood. The doctor told me that they were not the author of all the papers that bore their pseudonym. They had come from a future where the wealthy had pillaged everything the world had to offer before they traveled to the stars. The poor were left stranded and starving on a dying rock.

All the science that was changing medicine and physics and industry had been secret in their future and had been used to further enrich the wealthy and take them to the stars. Buried in the combination of it, they had missed how it made time travel possible. The doctor said their world had been different in the 2020’s, though.

I offered the possibility that other travelers had gone further back and changed something, and the doctor responded with the possibility that they had traveled to an alternate universe instead. Either way, they didn’t want to see what had happened to their world happen here.

When I asked about keeping the time travel secret, they said they weren’t worried about it. No one will believe it until the group of post-docs working on it at Caltech built the first working prototype. They estimated it would be done within the year. Once it’s built and proven, it’s a moot point.

The science has already been peer reviewed, the results replicated, and what could have amounted to billions of dollars’ worth of patents have been put into the public domain.

As I was preparing to leave, Dr. A said, “My world is already dead, my future is sealed. Yours is at the turning point. It’s up to you to do something about it.”

“How much of a difference can I make?” I asked.

They smiled, and the last thing they said to me was, “Think of all the time travel stories you know, how changing one small thing can drastically alter the future. That’s how. One small, positive change at a time.”