Chapter 1
Catastrophe.
A mysterious respiratory virus brought the world to a standstill. Hospitals across the country were so full of patients on the brink of death that they were overflowing.
This person was one of them.
“Cardiac arrest! Prepare 1 mg of epinephrine!”
CPR was a painful process.
With every chest compression, irregular electrical signals appeared on the ECG. The ventilator and ECG machine both blared alarms.
A desperate clamor to save the patient, and fast.
Every time I pressed down on the chest, I heard ribs cracking. It was horrible, but I couldn't just let them die.
How many had died from this plague? I hadn't been able to leave work for a hundred days, either.
There weren't enough ventilators in the ward.
No, forget ventilators—we didn't even have enough room for bodies in the morgue. We were storing corpses in refrigerated trucks in the parking lot.
Droplets that might have carried the deadly virus obscured the lenses of my protective goggles.
But I didn't have time to think about that.
First, I needed to focus on saving the patient.
I looked up at the change in the defibrillator's alarm. The patient had no pulse, but had gone back into ventricular tachycardia. A shockable rhythm.
Finally!
I kept doing compressions until the last moment, and the defibrillator pads were placed on the patient's chest.
“Clear!”
The defibrillator charged. The moment I took my hands off the patient, it delivered a shock.
The patient's body convulsed from the electric shock, and the ECG went flat. We stared at it in silence for one second, and-
Spontaneous circulation returned.
I let out a sigh of relief.
In the end, we saved them. Once the IV fluids were connected, the patient's blood pressure began to rise into the normal range.
Maybe it was because I hadn't slept lately, but my head was splitting with pain.
***
I was a doctor in my previous life, and I collapsed after pulling a hundred days of on-call shifts during an outbreak of some virus.
I thought I had a fever, so I figured I'd take some medicine and go to sleep. It seemed I never woke up.
And then I wound up in another world.
Well, I hadn't actually wound up in another world.
It wasn't another world, but America in the 1970s.
But think about it.
Different races, power struggles among the elite, wars against heretics, scholars dealing in knowledge ordinary people couldn't understand, and... It had all the ingredients. Couldn't I call it another world?
I became a black-haired middle schooler without any reincarnation perks, with nothing but my bare hands.
My name is Jisoo Parks.
My birth certificate listed my surname as Park, so you could just call me Park Jisoo.
It was the same name as in my previous life.
My adoptive parents couldn't have children, so they adopted a baby from Korea, as people often did in the 1960s, or so I was told.
Anyway.
That's how I ended up in 1960s America with the memories of a doctor from the 2020s.
Both my adoptive parents were American.
We lived in the California countryside, where the weather was always nice. My father was a blue-collar worker; we went to a Protestant church on Sundays, had a big dog in the yard, and watched baseball when the season came around.
Our golden retriever was asleep by the sunny window. It twitched now and then, as if chasing squirrels in its dreams.
It was a peaceful home.
A world I'd never experienced before.
America in its boom years, before the World Trade Center collapsed, when it felt as if scientific progress and social enlightenment would solve every problem in the world.
The world I'd lived in my previous life seemed absurd by comparison. The American Dream felt almost within reach.
My father turned a page of the newspaper beside me.
“What's wrong?”
“I thought of something I need to do.”
America was a society where ability came first, after all.
The average IQ of Americans in the 1970s was around 85 by modern standards.
Middle school was so easy it wasn't even funny. My name had appeared in the local paper a few times.
What was the headline again?
-The embodiment of the American Dream! The story of an Oriental adoptee who found a home with a Christian family.
Well, it was the times, so it would have been disappointing if there hadn't been at least a little racism. Anyway.
I planned to become a doctor again. Even though it was from my previous life, I believed the oath I'd taken then was still valid.
I'd sworn to protect the lives of my patients.
In modern times, reality had kept me from living up to my ideals, but this time I had options. There was so much I could do...
On the other hand, I was also looking forward to seeing how much I could make use of my knowledge of the future.
“Did you have a good day at school?”
“I took the GED.”
It was the equivalent of a high school equivalency exam in America at the time. Basically, it was a test to certify high school-level education.
“Did you do well?”
“I think I got all of them right.”
“Really? Good job.”
My father sat there, seemingly unconcerned, and continued turning the pages of the newspaper. Our dog was sleeping under the sofa with a chew toy in its mouth.
I got every question right.
***
This was another world. The emperor of the empire was Richard Nixon, and I was at the empire's academy...
I applied to Stanford Medical School.
Why Stanford instead of Harvard or Johns Hopkins? The reason was simple.
They said they'd give me a full scholarship.
My parents didn't have any money.
Six years of tuition at a private Ivy League university came to about 300 million won in today's currency. Living expenses near the university were just as unreasonable.
That's not something an ordinary person can afford, right?
I passed the application screening and stepped into the interview room at Stanford Medical School.
It had been a long time since I'd seen a white coat.
The professor who came out to the interview looked at me.
“Hello, Professor.”
My interviewer today was Clayton Rich, the dean of Stanford Medical School.
The dean came in person.
“You're the student recommended by the Weisman Foundation, aren't you? The one who skipped high school and came straight here.”
I nodded.
“That's right.”
“In my decades as a professor, I've never seen anything like this. I suppose there really are geniuses. A perfect score on the GED, a perfect score on the SAT. Going by your test scores alone, you'd be at the top of the class...”
The professor trailed off.
“Thank you, Professor.”
The notion of genius was still alive in the 1970s. It was an era when individuals could revolutionize academic fields, and if you had the ability, it was possible to enter college early.
It was a romantic era.
“Some of the other professors think we should admit fewer Asians, you know. They say Asians have strange personalities.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I believe even Japanese people should be given a fair chance. Even if they're like robots.”
“Arigato.”
I nodded. I was already used to it, so I didn't feel like bothering to argue.
It was a romantic era in many ways.
An age when people could still be openly racist. It was exhausting to be subjected to this kind of humiliation just because I had black hair.
But blond hair starts falling out in your thirties about half the time, so I didn't have much reason to feel wronged. I guess it happens...
And that's how I got into Stanford.
I turned out to be the only Asian at Stanford Medical School. There wasn't a single other Asian in my year.
“A Chinese middle schooler entering med school at the top of the class? What kind of crazy talk is that? How can that be real?”
It can be real!
“I'm right here, Professor. I'm not Chinese.”
“So you're the one who came in at the top. I'll take that as a compliment.”
American style, I guess. Could be.
I was back in the news for a while, too.
It was the same old story. An Oriental immigrant orphan boy enters Stanford at the top of his class, the American Dream, blah blah.
Since I'd already studied the material once, medical school wasn't all that difficult either.
I had forty years' worth of medical knowledge on top of what I was studying.
Compared to modern medical school, it was easy.
The number of antibiotics I had to memorize was only about half as many. Dozens of diseases hadn't even been discovered yet.
Now that I'd gotten in, there was something I needed to do.
What was the best way to prove myself? There was so much I could do.
On the other hand, to survive as a black-haired doctor in conservative, hidebound American high society, I needed something extraordinary...
A Nobel Prize!
I already knew which research would win the prize. If I moved quickly, I could make it happen.
1971.
It was not long after I entered as a first-year student. The best spot in the Stanford Medical School parking lot was empty.
The parking space had NL painted on it in white. Why was it empty?
A security guard walked over to me.
“Hey, student. You can't park there.”
“Is it a handicapped spot?”
“It's a parking spot for Nobel Prize winners.”
This was another world, right? It sounded insane, but when I thought about it, maybe it made sense.
NL (Nobel Laureate, Nobel Prize winner).
This world had its own common sense.
American Ivy League universities produced Nobel Prize winners all the time. “Win a Nobel, and we'll give you a parking spot!” was apparently a perfectly plausible deal.
Americans were crazy in so many ways. To think a Nobel Prize was worth no more than a single parking spot.
Americans worship cars.
Anyway.
Let's go with the surest possible method.
I'll win the Nobel Prize, shake off being treated like a black-haired outsider, and park in that spot.