Date: April 7, 2026 (Tuesday)
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Intersection
The imaginary grid shattered. The glowing dots turned back into ordinary, terrified people.
Albert snapped back to reality.
"Help! Someone help her! She can't breathe!"
The scream was the catalyst. The first pedestrian stopped near the planter box, a man dropping his briefcase in shock. Then two teenagers paused, instinctively came to the spot. A fourth person, an older woman in a coat, fumbled frantically with her own phone, loudly demanding an ambulance operator on speakerphone.
Within seconds, the laminar flow of the people collapsed into a dense, chaotic knot of fifteen people encircling the concrete planter.
"Help! Anyone, please help her!" the woman screamed again, her voice cracking with desperation.
Albert stopped. His primary instinct, honed by years of social avoidance, was to circumvent the anomaly. It was a high-entropy event. Too many unknown variables. Too much noise. The social friction of pushing through a crowd of fifteen bystanders was a severe negative multiplier to his cognitive load.
Then, through a gap in the legs of the bystanders, he saw the victim. A girl, maybe twelve years old, in a middle school uniform, was slumped against the concrete planter. She was clutching her chest with both hands. Her face was a terrifying shade of greyish-pale, and sweat drenched her hairline.
Albert didn't see a person. He saw a catastrophic biological pump failure.
This is an emergency. This is not the time to hesitate.
The sheer mathematical urgency of the situation violently overrode his social anxiety barriers. He didn't decide to move; his legs simply executed the necessary trajectory to intervene.
He shoved his way through the ring of useless, murmuring bystanders.
"Make way," Albert said, forcing himself to move forward. His voice wasn't loud, but it was stripped of all human hesitation, cutting through the panic like a cold knife.
In the center of the circle, a woman in a business suit was on her knees, hysterically clutching the girl's shoulders.
Next to her, a young lady in a white university nursing uniform was kneeling on the pavement, fumbling with a stethoscope. She looked utterly overwhelmed.
"I... I can't count it," the nursing student stammered, her hands shaking as she moved the stethoscope over the girl's racing heart. "It's too fast. It's just a blur. She's pale, diaphoretic, impending doom... we need an ambulance now!"
The student was correctly identifying the symptoms, but panic had paralyzed her analytical processing. She was useless.
Albert dropped to one knee on the other side of the girl. He ignored the aunt's sobbing. He ignored the student. He placed two fingers firmly against the girl's carotid artery in her neck.
He didn't guess. He looked at the stopwatch feature on his phone.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Ten seconds passed. He counted exactly thirty-five beats.
He multiplied by six. Two hundred and ten.
He held his fingers there for another five seconds. The rhythm was piston-like. Mechanically perfect. There was absolutely no variation as she gasped for air.
He did not rely on the nursing student's panicked observation. He ran the biological data through his own mental algorithm, stripping away the visual horror to focus entirely on the electrical wiring of the human heart.
Albert let his nerd side took over and run analysis.
Input variables: Severe pallor, diaphoresis, sustained pulse of 210 bpm. Variance: 0.00%.
Hypothesis 1: Extreme panic causing Sinus Tachycardia. Rejected. A natural adrenaline response maintains respiratory sinus arrhythmia. The pulse would naturally fluctuate as she inhaled and exhaled. This pulse is rigid. The biological variance is zero. The heart's primary pacemaker has been bypassed.
Diagnosis: Atrioventricular Nodal Reentrant Tachycardia.
The electrical signal is trapped in a microscopic circular pathway, short-circuiting the heart. Because the biological pump is firing at 3.5 hertz, the diastolic filling time—the fraction of a second when the chambers actually fill with blood—has dropped to near zero. The pump is running dry. The resulting crash in blood pressure is causing the pallor and the neurological sensation of impending doom.
System status: Rapidly approaching total hemodynamic collapse.
Solution requirement: A massive mechanical spike to the vagus nerve to force a hard system reboot.
"It is not a blur," Albert stated, his tone flat and clinical. He looked at the nursing student. "It is exactly two hundred and ten beats per minute with zero respiratory variance. It is a mechanical electrical loop. Stable Supraventricular Tachycardia."
The nursing student stared at him, her mouth slightly agape. "SVT? But... but we need a defibrillator or adenosine. We don't have a crash cart!"
"We don't need chemicals. We need physics," Albert said. He stood up abruptly. "Keep her sitting upright. Do not let her lie down yet. Hold her steady."
Before they could process his command, Albert sprinted ten feet to the open entrance of the pharmacy. He brushed past a startled cashier behind the counter.
"I need a ten-milliliter oral dosing syringe. Plastic. No needle. Now," Albert demanded.
The cashier, intimidated by the sheer intensity of the high school student, instantly grabbed one from a display bin and handed it over.
Albert ran back to the girl. The woman, who seems to be her guardian, was losing control again, rocking the girl back and forth. "Yui! Yui, stay with me! Why isn't the ambulance here?!"
"Stop shaking her," Albert commanded, his voice cracking like a whip. The woman froze. "If you want her heart to stop exploding, hold her shoulders still and be quiet."
The woman obeyed instantly, terrified into compliance.
Albert knelt in front of the twelve-year-old girl. Her eyes were wide with terror, her chest heaving uselessly.
"Look at me," Albert said. He didn't offer comfort. He offered an anchor. "Your heart's electrical system is caught in a feedback loop. We are going to mechanically force a reset."
He shoved the tip of the plastic syringe into her mouth.
"Seal your lips around this. Blow into it just hard enough to move the rubber plunger backward. Maintain exactly that much pressure. Do not stop until I tell you. Blow."
The girl, desperate for any solution, obeyed. She blew into the syringe. The resistance was immense. The veins in her neck bulged.
"What is this?" the nursing student whispered, horrified. "This isn't standard protocol! You're increasing her intrathoracic pressure!"
"Exactly forty millimeters of mercury," Albert corrected, his eyes glued to his phone's timer. "We are using pneumatic resistance to compress the vena cava."
Five seconds. Ten seconds. The girl was starting to fail.
"Keep blowing," Albert pressed.
Fifteen seconds.
"Stop."
Albert moved with violent precision. He ripped the syringe from her mouth, grabbed the girl by her shoulders, and threw her flat onto her back on the hard concrete pavement. Before her head even hit the ground, he grabbed both of her ankles and lifted her legs straight up into the air at a sharp forty-five-degree angle.
"What are you doing!?" the woman shrieked, trying to lunge forward.
The nursing student grabbed the woman's arm, her eyes widening as the logic finally clicked. "Wait! It's a passive leg raise! He's dumping venous blood back into her core!"
Albert held her legs rigid. Gravity did the rest. A massive volume of blood that had pooled in her legs rushed down into her torso, slamming into her heart. The sudden physical expansion stretched the aortic sensors, triggering a massive biological override signal straight up the vagus nerve.
Under Albert's fingers on her neck, the 210 bpm hammering abruptly stopped.
Silence. A terrifying, two-second flatline as the heart's electrical node reset.
Thump.
A slow, heavy, beautiful beat. Then another.
Thump.
Eighty beats per minute. Normal sinus rhythm.
The girl's eyes rolled back into focus. She took a massive, shuddering gasp of air that filled her lungs completely. The terrifying grey color vanished from her face, replaced by a healthy flush of oxygen.
"It broke," the nursing student whispered, staring at the girl's chest rising and falling normally. "He broke the SVT loop on the sidewalk."
Albert immediately lowered the girl's legs. The woman tried to pull her niece up into a sitting hug.
"Do not elevate her head," Albert barked, blocking the aunt with his arm. "Her vascular system is equilibrating. If she stands up now, gravity will drain the blood from her brain and she will syncope instantly. Keep her strictly supine for five minutes."
The woman froze, nodding tearfully, terrified to disobey him.
Albert stood up. The adrenaline of the mathematical problem was fading, immediately replaced by the crushing weight of fifteen bystanders staring directly at him. He needed to escape.
He pulled a small notepad and a mechanical pencil from his pocket. He scribbled rapidly in clinical shorthand, tore the page out, and thrust it at the stunned nursing student.
"Give this to the paramedics. It's the SBAR handoff."
The student looked down at the paper. It was a perfectly formatted medical note:
*Tx: Modified Valsalva (REVERT protocol) via 10ml syringe gauge @ 40mmHg/15s + 45deg PLR. Conversion from SVT @ 210bpm to NSR @ 80bpm. Needs 12-lead ECG to confirm baseline.*
Albert turned on his heel, calculating the fastest vector out of the crowd.
"Wait!"