She got into the OR about five minutes before eight. She was the first to arrive. The morning shift nurse was finishing up a log, eyes glued to the panel of computer screens in the observation booth. Vera poked her head in.
"How is our patient?"
The nurse glanced up. "Didn't wake up, no real changes other than what looks like some very lucid dreaming according to his EEG," he said. "He got a bit inflamed near his arm about 4 am, and he's just on the tail end of some nasty immunosuppressants that I put him on. Didn't want to take any chances."
"Good work," said Vera.
She went back outside, waited in front of Jensen with arms folded for the others to trickle in. The necrosis in his left arm was definitely looking worse; an ominously black scaled occlusion lined the edges of his fingers and the shrapnel wound like corrosion. We're killing him in here, a part of her thought inanely, and Vera made a mental note to get more coffee before she made any important decisions. The rest of him still didn't look too better, with the remnants of blood tracking across the surface of his chest and oozing out of the ceramic pores of his cybernetic prostheses.
Despite it all, she couldn't help seeing handsome features underneath the damage. He was hawk-nosed and built like the carbon composites they'd upgraded him with, the contours of his face and shoulders made of edged lines that wouldn't have looked out of place on the chassis of a fighter jet. He already looked like a killing machine, in fact. He looked like he'd been bred for this.
"How's our boy?"
Vera shook off her pensiveness and looked up at David, just coming in. "Well enough, I suppose."
"Good." If David was shaken or withdrawn from the intermittent fighting between them yesterday he didn't seem to show it. "Vera, look, about yesterday. I'm sorry." The words came out matter-of-fact.
Vera folded her arms and waited, almost surprised at her own skepticism.
"You gotta know how bad this is for me," said David. "What's on the line here. But what you said to me... I don't want to be a monster. I don't want to throw away everything I've built, Vera. Or why I built it in the first place." He looked away. "I'm trying to say... there were times, when the DoD was banging down my door trying to get military aug bids, or fighting against Tai Yong... you've had to be my conscience sometimes, Vera. Thank you."
She blinked once, genuinely touched despite her suspicions.
"I'm not gonna throw this kid's life away," said David. "I'm glad you spoke up."
"David..."
"Anyway." He took off the beginnings of sentimentality like a wet coat. "The arm prosthesis is ready. Can you link up, double-check the bioware interface?"
"Of course, David."
She went to get coffee, drank half of it, and plugged into the prosthesis mainframe. She was sluggish at first, weighed down with her own brain chemistry until the caffeine kicked in. The bioware, the software which governed the prosthesis' interactions with Jensen's body at the cellular and tissue levels, was well-written but silicon-standard. Vera took the time to personalize it to Jensen's body chemistry, recompiled it, and ran a few simulations before she was certain it would take.
She came out of it just in time to see Sarif stacking parts in front of Jensen's operating table. Two legs. Another arm. All of them smooth ceramic, artfully curved in a way that put her in mind of scalpels.
"David," Vera murmured, "David, what are you doing?"
David glanced at her, out of the corner of his eye, but said nothing.
She tried again. "His right arm isn't injured enough to justify removal. Neither are either of his legs. David. David!"
Yan folded his arms. "Dr Marcovic is correct, Mister Sarif. Jensen's right arm needs replacement, but the remainder of his injuries can heal with time."
David shook his head. "Adam doesn't have that kind of time. He's not going to just sit on the sidelines for a year or more. He'll want to get back in play faster than that."
It was as if, Vera thought later, they were reading from a script. But maybe that was only paranoia. She realized later that she should have said more herself. Done more. But at the time, intoxicated with exhaustion, distracted by the prosthesis systems that half her consciousness was still practically embedded in, and too willing to just trust that bastard Sarif thanks to their shared history and his synthesized remorse, she'd only blinked in astonishment and said nothing.
"I will not do this operation," said Yan, "without consent from the patient first."
"I've got power of attorney," said David. "He's in a coma for now, with no reason for us to suspect he'll regain consciousness. My augments are the only thing keeping him alive. And I know Adam. I know what he'd want me to do. You'll give him the implants."
Yan tilted his head, and looked back at Jensen almost doubtfully.
"You can see the contract if you'd like," said David.
"That will not be necessary," said Yan. He glanced at Vera. So did David.
"This," she said at last, "this is pure insanity. We are already risking this man's life with the augmentations we put in last night. You want to add more synthetic surfaces for his immune system to attack? He will go into shock and die. He will be dead before the inflammation dies down."
"That's the beauty of it," said David. "We're removing enough of his bone marrow that we should be suppressing any initial immune response to a manageable level."
"The beauty of it," murmured Vera in disgust.
But what could she do? Just walk away? And what would happen then? The operation wouldn't stop, she thought. All that would happen is someone less qualified would take up the job. Another Sarif lackey that David could sway with charisma. And maybe, maybe David was right. She didn't know Adam Jensen. And in that one awful moment of sin, which would stay with her later like a streak of rust on her soul, she didn't want to have to be the one making the call.
She would hate herself for her weakness, later.
They replaced his left arm. Yan chopped through it with a bright orange laser saw that left the stench of cooked flesh in the room like a stain. Even as the blood spat out the smart coagulants latched in and wove Jensen shut again. The spider arms of the autosurgeon came down again in swift rhythm and on Vera's monitors Jensen's augmented heart spiked as his body registered damage, only to sweep down again as the regulator systems kicked in and overruled his organic components. His heart rate came down, weakened, slowing the arterial bleeding so the synth blood's coagulants could do their work. Jensen's skeleton was the load-bearing structure for the augmentations, but it was built for flesh instead of circuitry. It needed an upgrade. The autosurgeon swung in and with a low chugging rhythm began to pump in the porous fiberglass composite that would saturate the bone. Later, after the same had been done where his other limbs had been, it would bolt in the prosthesis hardpoint, a plug for the Sarif machine that would replace his organic arm forever. Vera finished her modifications to the other machines as she worked, stacking them in order as she finished for Yan to pick up, like an assembly line.
It took a few hours. Vera lost track of time, her mind swimming through an ocean of imaging and sensor information, a waterfall of data that she swam upstream through fighting the current just to stay in place. She was managing the immunosuppressants, the pain meds, the augments' and synth blood's responses to the surgery. She even found the need to spike Jensen's IV with one of the few universally-effective antibiotics they had, an early-stage micromachine prototype just off the shelves based on amoeba architecture which killed bacteria by spearing them with gold nanospikes. It was like conducting a symphony. It was easy to lose herself in the work.
When the last hardpoint went in, Vera jacked out. She came to with David standing a few meters away, gloved hands on the table, staring at Adam Jensen through his scrubs with a blank expression on his face.
"David."
He turned, unwillingly, to look at her.
"You are not the man I met in Poland."
Contact. He flinched visibly, barely enough for Vera to understand that she had managed to hurt him. The fact that there was something left to hurt, that surprised her. She felt a sudden spike of guilt before she clamped down and crushed it.
David glanced at her. "I. I have to get back to my company, get some projects moving."
"I will remain here, with Mr. Jensen."
Yan frowned. "You've certainly earned some rest, Dr. Marcovic. Jensen's body needs time to acclimate to his implants. A few days at the least. A nurse could-"
"I will remain here. For the rest of the shift at least." It wasn't a fully rational action. She'd stayed because she was the most experienced specialist in Detroit. It seemed like hypocrisy to abandon him now.
Yan nodded but said nothing.
Adam Jensen regained consciousness several hours afterwards, at least temporarily. Vera was the only one in the OR; David had somehow managed to ensure that there had been no witnesses to his little treachery other than Vera and Yan. With everything in place, only the machine-body interface specialist, and the implants and expertise sufficient to connect into all of the equipment and observe everything, would be required. Normally that was a nurse. Until the end of her shift it would be her instead.
"Megan," he said suddenly. "Megan, where's Megan, I need to talk to..." Jensen coughed and blood spattered his lips. He turned to look at her. "Need to talk to Megan, where's Megan..."
She sat down beside him, movements slow. She couldn't hold his hand-he had no hands-and so she rested one hand on one of his shoulders just above his arm plug until he went under again.
