Dr. David Kahn

David Kahn is a methodical, systems-oriented electrical engineer who has spent his career in the orderly world of academic research, with a passion for the history of technology. In 2025, he is a visiting professor at Stanford. He is precise, analytical, wry under pressure, and constitutionally inclined to treat every problem, including an impossible one, as an engineering challenge to be solved, step by step.

He is also a man whose private life has been quietly coming apart. His marriage has reached its end. His adult daughter has put distance between them, not out of cruelty but out of self-preservation. His relationship with mid-shelf bourbon is the kind of relationship men don’t admit to having.

Which makes what happens to him stranger still.

He wakes up wounded, disoriented, in an evacuation hospital in wartime Seoul — with no memory of how he arrived and no explanation that anyone around him would believe. His first instinct is not panic. It is assessment. He catalogs his environment the way an engineer catalogs a system: noting what fits, what doesn’t, what the evidence implies. He tests hypotheses. He tries to quantify the impossible.

David is, at his core, an honest man who discovers under pressure that he is a terrible liar. He conceals by instinct what he believes he should, leaks by accident when he shouldn’t, and then spends the hours afterward auditing the damage. He is guarded with everyone — not because he distrusts people but because the truth he carries is one that only makes things worse to say aloud.

The question at the center of his story is not whether he can survive. It is whether a man who left the most important relationships of his life in ruins has anything worth protecting — and whether protecting the future and protecting the people he loves are, finally, the same thing or different ones.