Microstory 1178: Dr. Mallory Hammer

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Mallory Hammer was a time traveler. While other people had interesting niches or limitations, her power was pretty simple. She could move back and forth through time at will. She also had pretty good aim, which was good, because when she did jump through time, it was very important when and where she landed. The only use she found for her ability at first was to get a really good education, or rather, more like an array of education. She was born in the late twentieth century, which meant she could easily receive an early twenty-first century medical degree. She did not believe this was enough, however, if she wanted to be the best doctor in histories. She couldn’t just rely on future medical advancements either, though. For one thing, much of medicine in the future is done by nanotechnology, and other forms of automation. Future doctors just don’t know a whole lot about the practice of medicine. They mostly know how to operate the machinery, and even further in the future, human medical professionals do not even exist at all. So her education was done in three waves. She learned what she could in her own time, then jumped to the future with a new identity to learn more, and find a source of highly advanced tech. Then she went into the past, to learn the ways doctors did it long ago. This was the most difficult for her, being a woman, and also having to listen to people claim ridiculous things could be used to cure ailments, like like leeches. Still, she felt it was important to understand their misconceptions, not just for the sake of it, but also for practical reasons. If she wanted to help people in the past, she couldn’t exactly use a handheld MRI machine, or something. She had to do it in a way they were familiar with. Of course, that didn’t mean she couldn’t sneak in pills that wouldn’t exist for years. If she didn’t find a clever way to help them, then there was really no point in not just letting normal doctors take care of it. After spending an unknown amount of time as a time traveling doctor, Mallory started realizing this wasn’t doing the world much good. No matter how much she traveled, she was still only one person, and could only help so many others. She ended up just becoming a doctor for other temporal manipulators; aiding in both their physical, and psychiatric needs. She commissioned The Switcher to make her a communication system, so that anyone, anywhen, with her number could contact her for help on a special time pager. She didn’t really have a home base, but she would sometimes spend a significant amount of time, stationed in one place. She also did a fair amount of research into time travel, and its effects on the human body, because apparently, no one had thought to look into that before.