The Least Important Man (short story)

The Least Important Man was the ninth story in the Bernice Summerfield anthology Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Dead Men Diaries. It was written by Steven Moffat.

Plot
One night when Gavin Oliver Scott was a baby, he woke up and saw a woman standing over him, mouthing something noiselessly. He saw her in the living room whilst playing with building blocks and again when he was at his friend Toby's house. Toby said without looking that she was his family's gardener, but he later saw her on his first day of school and, believing that she was a teacher, asked her if he could go to the toilet. When she did not answer, he went anyway and got lost, after which Mrs Grillo told him that there was no other teacher. Gavin's mother told him that she was imaginary.

Gavin ignored the woman when he saw her after he won the egg and spoon race, when he won a prize for English, after his first kiss with Rosemary Pope and at his grandmother's funeral. When he was twelve, he saw her whilst the class laughed about his essay about wanting to live in the future and understood what she was mouthing to him; she was telling him that he was not being stupid, which made him realise that he would love her forever. At university, he meets and falls in love with Irene Gilbey and is a close friend of hers for three years, not confessing his feelings to her and being unaware that she is having affairs with Mr Frisby and Toby.

Having learnt to lip-read from Irene, Gavin is able to communicate with the woman when she appears in his flat by reading her lips and holding up cards. He learns that she is Bernice Summerfield and that she is looking through his life with a Quantum Imager from the 27th century as part of a lecture on life in the 20th century. She tells him that he will commit suicide today and be the only well-preserved body from that time period. Aware that failing to kill himself would create a temporal paradox, he jumps off of a bridge and into a mud bank.

The mud, likely of alien origin, preserves him for six centuries and his body is put on display for fifty years after he is discovered. It is only thanks to the Quantum Imager that it has been discovered that he has been alive all that time. Benny restores him, granting his childhood dream of living in the future.

Characters

 * Bernice Summerfield
 * Irving Braxiatel
 * Gavin Oliver Scott
 * Toby Wilton
 * Mrs Grillo
 * Mum
 * Mr Frisby
 * Irene Gilbey

Continuity
to be added