Riley Part 1
A strangely smooth-skinned man watched the surgical procedure begin. His eyes glowed a deep green in the fluorescent light. On the opposite side of a clear plexiglas window, his most recently acquired employee was prostrate on a surgical table, technicians and two robot manipulator arms surrounding her in a complex synchronized dance.
The patient, a woman, was not anesthetized in the traditional sense. She was simply unable to feel that her inner ears were slowly being replaced. At the beginning of the surgery, a robot arm equipped with a micro-dermal laser had sliced through her skin right below the ear and blocked the necessary nerves on each side of her head. The technicians had given her the option of watching the procedure, but she had declined and was instead reading a book with the aid of a page-turning assistant.
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