The refugee who saw holes in American logic—and then became one himself.

INT. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY CONFERENCE ROOM—1943—DAY

Cigarette smoke. Slide rules. The weight of war pressing down like a low ceiling.

ABRAHAM WALD hunches over aircraft diagrams, his English still thick with Hungarian consonants that refuse to assimilate.

His suit hangs loose—refugee chic, straight off the Jewish Goodwill rack.

Behind him: a wall map of Europe. Red pins mark cities that no longer exist.

Including the one where his family used to live.

MILITARY OFFICER (Colonel-level impatience):
We need armor recommendations. Yesterday.

WALD (not looking up):
You want me to tell you where to put the metal?

OFFICER:
Where the bullet holes are. Obviously.

Wald finally looks up.

WALD:
Obviously.

WALD taps the aircraft diagram with his pencil.

WALD:
Tell me, Colonel—when you count your dead soldiers, do you count the ones who never made it home?

OFFICER (confused):
What?

WALD:
These holes…

Beat, haunted.

They show you where a plane can get shot and still bring its crew home for dinner.

OFFICER:
So we armor those spots.

WALD:
No.

Beat.

You armor where the holes aren’t.

The room goes quiet except for the scratching of pencils and the distant sound of math being weaponized.

WALD (darker):
The missing planes don’t vanish.
They just stop being measured.
That’s how you lose wars.

Beat.

That’s how you lose people.
Ask anyone in a hospital bed.
Or an institution.
Or a grave.

The room finally gets it.

WALD (dryly):
Turns out, the most dangerous bias isn’t just who survives.
It’s who gets to be counted.

⸻

MONTAGE: BOMBER COMMAND

Welding sparks.
Engines gleaming with fresh armor.
New planes roll off assembly lines.

⸻

FLASH FORWARD: AIR INDIA FLIGHT VT-CFK—DECEMBER 13, 1950

INT. AIRCRAFT CABIN—DAY

Wald is sitting and reviewing his lecture notes for the Indian Science Congress.

Through the window: the Nilgiri Mountains rising like statistical projections.

Cut to black.

⸻

FINAL SHOT: COLUMBIA STATISTICS DEPARTMENT HALLWAY—PRESENT DAY

A bronze plaque on the wall:

ABRAHAM WALD

1902–1950
Father of sequential analysis.
He taught us to see what wasn’t there.

Below it, in smaller text:

Died in plane crash—data unavailable.