"I told you," said David smugly. "His body can take it."
"Miraculous," said Yan. He tilted the MRI scan in his hand as if expecting it to vanish into its opposite like an early-century holograph.
Jensen had awoken three days prior. After several careful verifications from a few psychologists and Vera herself that his mind was intact, Yan and Sarif had been brought in to continue the augmentation process. Ostensibly, the meeting was a consult with Jensen but Vera was certain David had already made up his mind. Her deal with David notwithstanding, she'd have been remiss in her work if she hadn't asked for CT scans of the body-machine interfaces, to determine how badly Jensen's body was responding to the prosthetics. At this stage, Vera would expect inflammation to line every prosthesis like a biological wall, but instead there was almost nothing. Jensen's condition was improving by the day, possibly because he was more machine than man at this point anyway.
Mentally, he seemed to be in fine enough shape, at least as far as physical brain trauma was concerned. Vera hadn't met him before the attack, but talking to him was a disconcerting experience for her reminiscent of the times she'd worked with shell-shocked war veterans. His gaze was always a thousand yards away, and whenever she made eye contact with him, his absence of expression put her in mind of a fighter jet left in a hanger bay: All sleek functionality, all high-performance military-grade hardware, but cockpit empty. It made her wonder who he'd been before the attack, and whether they'd brought him back or simply rebuilt an effigy of him in his place.
"Tell me again," said Jensen, "what you want to do."
He was looking at her. So was David. Vera cleared her throat, and waited for Yan to step back far enough that he was out of earshot. Medical experiments were apparently all well and good for him, but corporate espionage was where he drew his line.
"At this point," Vera said, "We have added sufficient hardware to keep you alive and with approximately the same level of capability as you were before the assault on Sarif's headquarters." As well as other add-ons that turn you into a living bomb, among other things. David had shared the exact specifications of all of Jensen's hardware with her earlier that morning, and the fact she'd helped implant a terrorist's wet dream into a corporate enforcer potentially hell-bent on revenge didn't sit well with her at all.
"However, David Sarif can provide several additional augmentations, mostly prototypes, which will augment your capabilities in combat, infiltration, and espionage. Augmentations well suited to pursuing the group who assaulted Sarif Industries." She almost expected David to launch into an advert spiel, extolling the benefits of the hardware as if they were some kind of new power drill for home renovation, but he stayed silent and arms folded. Maybe he'd finally found his own point of no return, as she had.
"Like what?"
David ticked them off his fingers as he went. "Augmentations to your skin that'll let it repel bullets like kevlar and let you blend in to your surroundings like a chameleon, but leave it identical to the casual observer. A HUD with a whole bevy of espionage and combat functions, including radar and an aim stabilizer. Artificial eyes with t-ray and thermal imaging systems to see through walls and flashbang suppressors, although we couldn't compartmentalize everything into just the eye prosthetics. We've got an eye protection/information aug that the HUD's going on to."
"Prosthetic glasses," said Adam, without any apparent humor. "Why not put in a CASIE aug while we're at it?"
"That went in earlier," said David. Adam's expression didn't change, but he shook his head slowly, nonplussed.
"Anything else?"
David shrugged. "We've got a couple more devices in the pipe, but it's down to the wire whether they'll be ready for the operation. We'll add in an infolink system with cochlear implants and a subvocalizer if we can."
"I need a moment alone with my patient," said Vera. The two men swung to look at her, David with his eyebrows raised slightly in concerned irritation, and Jensen without any expression at all.
"All right," said David Sarif. He walked over to where Yan was and, by the look of things, began going over the surgery specifics. Vera sat down next to Adam.
"How do you feel about all this?"
Adam just looked at her. "Feel?"
"About the operations," said Vera. "About your augmentation."
Jensen kept looking at her, but his eyes unfocused and he seemed to stare right through her. His voice was empty. "Megan's dead."
"Yes."
"I remember you. Talking to you. Earlier. Asking where Megan was."
"Almost a week ago now."
Jensen's expression hardened. "What do you think I feel? I want answers. I want to find the people that did this."
"Anger is a natural expression of grief, but-"
"You want me to move on? Look at me." Jensen grimaced. "You brought back a ghost."
Vera sighed. "Mr Jensen, David is manipulating you. He is using your emotions to engender compliance. He is committed to rebuilding you, into... into a weapon."
"I take it that's not why you entered medicine."
The deadpan caught her off guard and in other circumstances she might have laughed. "No. No, it is not." She sat down next to him. "Even if you find answers, find revenge upon the people that did this, one day you will stop being Sarif's attack dog and become a human being instead. Even while you are Sarif's attack dog, you are still a human being. What recourse in society is there for a killing machine?"
Jensen's mouth quirked into the beginnings of a smile. "Right now, Doctor, this job's all I've got. But when that day comes for me, maybe there'll be an augmentation for that too. Erase my memories, erase the anger, erase Megan and the attack from my memory, maybe put in a dopamine jack for optimism...The sky's the limit with this stuff, Doctor."
"Just consider your future, Mr Jensen," said Vera.
Jensen raised his voice. "Sarif! Get the augmentations. I'm ready."
One final operation, this time with local anesthesia. Skin peeled away like a bandage, wires laid down underneath. Delicate eye surgery as Jensen's fragile flesh was first replaced with polymers and silicon and then armored. "Give him the telecom package," said David, about five hours in. It had arrived only seconds earlier. There hadn't been time to brief Yan, she supposed, because the autosurgeon halted with car crash suddenness, and Yan turned to look at her. At Vera, not David. There was something on his face like exasperation at it all, and Vera almost smiled at the way that, after everything Sarif had done, it was lack of proper OR procedure that finally put him on the wrong side of Yan. But after everything, Vera supposed it didn't matter anymore. And Adam looked catatonic for all that he cared. She inclined her head in a nod, fractionally slight.
"Fine," said Yan. "Fine. Set it up."
Vera sensed motion in her peripheral vision and looked down. On the operating table, Jensen's hand was unclenching and clenching, endlessly, into a fist.
