1

Doctor Stephen Strange was having a typical day, tapping his foot to a funk soundtrack as he performed a delicate repair on a patient with a highly unusual heart problem. Every surgery he did took place in the hospital’s main operating theater so medical students could watch him work. He was the best in the world at what he did. He knew everything there was to know about the human body, and he had the rock-steady hands and the nerve to try surgeries that ordinary doctors thought were impossible.

He also liked to play musical trivia while he worked.

One of his head nurse Billy’s jobs was to keep a playlist going and challenge Strange’s musical knowledge. Strange was never wrong. Never.

“Challenge round, Billy,” he said. Usually, Billy played him a mix of old rock and funk music. During the challenge rounds he was allowed to go to other kinds of music.

Billy tapped the skip button on the operating-room console. Smooth jazz filled the air. “Oh, come on, Billy,” Strange said. “You’ve got to be messing with me.”

“No, Doctor.” Billy sounded so smug that Strange took a little extra pleasure in hitting him with an immediate answer.

“1977,” he declared after rattling off the name of an obscure album. “Honestly, Billy, you said this one would be hard.”

“Ha!” Billy said. “It’s 1978.”

“No, Billy, while the song may have charted in 1978, the album was released in December 1977.”

“No, no. Wikipedia says the—”

“Check again.” This, Strange thought, was the difference between him and ordinary people. They knew a little and thought they knew a lot. He knew a lot, period.

“Where do you store all this useless information?” asked his surgical partner, Doctor Bruner.

“Useless? The man charted a top ten hit with a flugelhorn.” Strange was certain that had only happened once. “Status, Billy?” he prompted.

Billy sighed. “1977.”

“Oh please. I hate you,” Doctor Bruner grumbled.

“Whoa! Feels so good, doesn’t it?” Strange chuckled at his own joke, then glanced up as he saw someone at the door. It was Doctor Christine Palmer, Strange’s colleague—and his ex-girlfriend.

“Oh,” Bruner said when she saw Christine. “I’ve got this, Stephen. You’ve done your bit. Go ahead, we’ll close up.”

Out in the hall, Christine handed him a tablet with images of a patient’s very badly damaged brain. “What is that?” he asked.

“GSW,” she said, using the doctors’shorthand for a gunshot wound.

He swiped through the images. “It’s amazing you kept him alive. Apneic, further brain stem testing after reflex test...I think I found the problem, Doctor Palmer. You left a bullet in his head.”

“Thanks,” she said dryly. “It’s impinging on the medulla. I needed a specialist. Nic diagnosed brain death. Something about that doesn’t feel right to me.”

Strange looked more closely at the image. Something about the bullet...Ah. He knew what had happened, and knew they would have to act fast to stop Nic West from doing something stupid. “We have to run.”

They caught up to Nic West wheeling the patient into another operating room. “Doctor West!” Christine called. “What are you doing? Hey!”

“Organ harvesting,” West answered. “He’s a donor.”

“Slow down. I did not agree to that.”

“I don’t need you to,” he said, starting to get irritated. “We’ve already called brain death.”

“Prematurely,” Strange cut in. “We need to get him prepped for a suboccipital craniotomy.”

West shook his head. “I’m not going to let you operate on a dead man.”

Strange held up the image that had caught his attention. “What do you see?”

“A bullet?”

“A perfect bullet.” Most bullets were squashed out of shape when they punched into a human body. This one wasn’t. That was the clue that Strange had latched on to. “It’s been hardened,” he explained. “You harden a bullet by alloying lead with antimony. A toxic metal. And as it leaks directly into the cerebral spinal fluid...”

West understood. “Rapid onset central nervous system shutdown.”

Christine turned the gurney around. “We need to go.”

“The patient’s not dead, but he’s dying. Do you still want to harvest his organs?” Strange couldn’t resist the little jab at Doctor West.

“I’ll assist you,” West offered.

“No, Doctor Palmer will assist me. Thank you.” They left West there and got to the operating room as fast as they could. There wasn’t much time. Strange used a tiny blade to open the smallest possible path to the bullet. When he was done, he handed it to Christine.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

Now they had to retract the bullet. The patient’s brain was still bleeding. “Image guidance, stat,” she called.

Normally, a surgeon would use a tiny robotic arm to extract a bullet from such a delicate part of the body, but Strange knew they didn’t have the minutes they would have to wait. “We do not have time for that.”

“You can’t do it by hand,” Christine objected.

“I can and I will.”

“This isn’t the time for showing off, Strange,” Doctor West said. He had caught up and was observing from the far end of the operating room.

“How about ten minutes ago, when you called the wrong time of death?” Strange shot back. He never took his eyes off what he was doing. “Cranial nerves intact,” he noted. If—when—he got the bullet out, the patient would recover.

A nurse rolled the image guidance screen up to the operating table, even though Strange wasn’t using it. On it everyone could see the surgical pliers reaching slowly toward the bullet.

Strange noticed a tiny flash of reflected light out of the corner of his eye. He couldn’t afford the slightest distraction. “Doctor West, cover your watch.”

West did. Everyone in the operating room held their breaths as Strange pushed the pliers deeper into the patient’s brain, avoiding the most critical nerves and blood vessels. His hands were steady and perfect, as always. He found the bullet, feeling the touch of it through the pliers in his fingertips. Slowly and evenly, he drew it out. It gleamed in the surgical lamps, and he dropped it into a pan.

After that, closing the patient up was child’s play. He left that to Doctor West. Then he delivered the good news to the patient’s family, and even accepted a hug. “You know,” Christine said as they walked toward the break room, “you didn’t have to humiliate him in front of everyone.”

“I didn’t have to save his patient, either,” Strange pointed out. “But, you know, sometimes I just can’t help myself.”

“Nic is a great doctor.”

Not as great as I am, Strange thought with more than a little characteristic bemusement. “You came to me.”

“Yeah, well, I needed a second opinion.”

“You had a second opinion. What you needed was a competent one.”

“Well, all the more reason why you should be my neurosurgeon on call.” Christine was the head surgeon in the emergency room. “You could make such a difference.”

“I can’t work in your butcher shop,” Strange said. Over her objection, he went on. “Look, I’m using trans-sectioned spinal cords to stimulate neurogenesis in the central nervous system. My work is at least going to save thousands for years to come. In the ER, I get to save one drunk idiot with a gun.”

“Yeah, you’re right. In the ER, you’re only saving lives. There’s no fame, there’s no interviews...Well, I guess I’ll have to stick with Nic.”

“Oh, wait a minute. You’re not...you guys aren’t...”

“What?”

“Sorry, I thought that was implicit in my disgust.”

“Explicit, actually. And no, I have a very strict rule against dating colleagues.”

“Oh, really?” He was living proof that she hadn’t always had that rule.

“I call it the Strange Policy.” She had set him up.

Ouch, Strange thought. But he didn’t let her know she had gotten to him. “Oh, good! I’m glad something is named after me. You know, I invented a laminectomy procedure, and yet, somehow, no one seems to want to call it the Strange technique.”

“We invented that technique,” she corrected him.

“Well, regardless, I’m very flattered by your policy.” He missed her. It was hard to admit, but it was true. “Look,” he said. “I’m talking tonight at a Neurological Society dinner. Come with me.”

“Another speaking engagement?” Christine rolled her eyes. “So romantic.”

“You used to love going to those things with me. We had fun together.”

“No.” She laughed. “You had fun. They weren’t about us; they were about you.”

“Not only about me.”

“Stephen,” she said, and now she was still smiling but sad at the same time. “Everything is about you.” She started to walk away.

“Maybe we can hyphenate,” he called after her. “Strange-Palmer technique.”

“Palmer-Strange,” she called back. Then she was gone.

He took his time getting ready for the Neurological Society dinner, and when he left his loft—a full floor in Lower Manhattan—Strange knew he was looking good. He gunned his car out into the evening traffic, loving the way it felt. He was almost as good a driver as he was a surgeon, and he drove as if he were on a racetrack. He was outside the city on a winding two-lane road when Billy called in. He always had Billy on the lookout for interesting cases.

“Billy! What have you got for me?”

“I’ve got a thirty-five-year-old Air Force colonel. Crushed his lower spine in some kind of experimental armor. Mid-thoracic vertebral fracture.”

“Well, I could help, but so can fifty other people. Find me something worth my time.” Strange didn’t waste his talent on patients any ordinary neurosurgeon could fix.

“I have a sixty-eight-year-old female with an advanced brain stem glioma.”

That was a death sentence no matter who the surgeon was. “Yeah, you want me to screw up my perfect record? Definitely not.”

“How about a twenty-two-year-old female with an electronic implant in her brain to control schizophrenia struck by lightning?”

“That does sound interesting. Could you send me the...” His phone pinged and images appeared. “Got it.” He glanced from the road down to the image, then back to the road. He swung into the other lane to pass the car in front of him. Then he looked back down to the image.

Then he made a mistake.

His car scraped the other car’s fender and careened away. Strange hauled at the wheel, but it was too late. He spun off the road and crashed into a tree. Then he kept going down a steep bluff, smashing through other trees and plowing into the ground on the bank of the Hudson River. The last thing he saw before he passed out was blood on his hands.

Then...nothing.