Finally, hours after the operation was completed, Jensen went home. He went home with his legs programmed for basic automated movements rather than full conscious control for the moment, since he'd need time to acclimate to his new limbs. Yan nodded at both of them one last time and then unplugged and stalked out, like a machine sentry returning to its cave. The nurses and techs filtered out as their respective shifts ended. The OR would be automatically sterilized and sanitized once it was empty, so there wasn't much left for them to do.

That left David and Vera.

David cleared his throat, jerked his hand in the OR doors Jensen had recently departed through. "See? Told you."

Vera said nothing. She picked absently at one of the bloodstains Jensen had left on the OR table with one gloved hand.

"I'm gonna need you in the coming weeks, Vera," said David. "I know we've had... differences of opinion..." David trailed off when Vera didn't so much as give any indication she had heard him say anything.

"Jensen will be my last patient," said Vera clearly. "After this, we are finished. I am finished."

David snorted. "So who're you going to play ball for after this instead of LIMB, then? Tai Yong?"

"No. I mean I am finished practicing... 'medicine'. This is not what I was trained for, David. I have some money saved; my work has been my life for forty years now. When Jensen is completely healed several months from now, I will have my implants shut down and go find one of the few places on the planet not touched by what we have created yet, and become a doctor again."

"What? Come on. You heard him. He wanted the implants. He wanted to be augmented. That man-"

"Jensen is a product," said Vera.

That brought David up short. He floundered for words while Vera plodded on monotonously.

"When we started doing this, David, we were not able to improve the capabilities of the human body. We could barely come close. Our inventions were stopgap solutions, meager attempts at improving lives but never as advanced as the biology that governed us. That set us apart from the machines we made. It made us unique, irreplaceable."

David grimaced. "Now you sound like one of Taggart's zombie hippie followers."

"As our knowledge, as a society, advances, it nestles mostly in the hands of increasingly specialized experts separate from the general population. We aren't making the equivalent of another wheel, or fire, or crop rotation, David. These are not ideas that can be widely interpreted and spread through our society. You are building something incomprehensible to everyone but its creators. Its users are dependent on you. It is more than the neuropozyne that makes the augmented addicts; their functionality and their futures are dependent on the support you deign to sell to them. Jensen will spend the rest of his life dependent on your company. On its intellectual property rights, on the engineers who manufacture and manage the products he relies on, on the business entity that thrives on propagating itself. He is no longer even an individual. He is now only a cog in a larger machine, an element of a larger organism."

"Oh, come on!" Given everything David Sarif felt he was fighting for, Vera supposed he had every right to feel furious at that. "He still gets free will! He still gets to live his own life! All I ever did was give him a second chance! And I brought him back better! Believe me, Vera, he's more himself than he ever was!"

"Oh, truly? Can Jensen modify his own augments, then? Can he alter their physical operation, improve them? Even if he could understand how to augment himself, beyond activation of already-implanted hardware, something which I had to force you to give him in the first place, would your lawyers and enforcers let him? Or is he dependent on your assistance, your repairs and software updates, your ideas and knowledge, to so much as be alive?"

David looked away and pursed his lips, as if he'd tasted rot in the center of ripe fruit. Vera felt a deep sense of pity.

"What we do is not medicine anymore, David. It is engineering, and on top of everything else it is engineering compromised by the self-preservation needs of institutional entities, from corporations to governments. This is not an act of augmentation, but of control. That is the true horror of what we have created. People are technology now."

She left him there, and when the OR doors closed behind her she had to huddle in a nearby corner where the walls met, one hand over her eyes, just breathing. Fortunately whatever damage she'd done to Sarif in there had ensured he didn't follow her out for some time. Eventually she blinked a few times until she was sure the tears wouldn't leave her eyes, and walked away.

Of the two conversations she needed to have but wanted more than anything to avoid, at least one was over.