No review for today, just me making more material in the setting I created with When Dawn Broke.  I haven’t done an exhaustive examination of what the bits and bobs I casually conjured up in that first piece would mean for a setting, so I’ve decided for now to continue to fly by the seat of my pants with this one.  Sorry, Stephanie.  Enjoy the short scene after the break.

His patient was already anesthetized, lying still on the slab in front of him, naked and bare to the world.  Unconsciousness reduced the body to a lump of inert flesh, cutting into the man little different than cutting up a chicken for dinner, excepting the quiet beeps and slow movement of the chest that told the doctor that his patient was still viable.  There was the same gentle, almost elastic resistance as his scalpel parted the patient’s flesh, a long shallow cut to begin the separation of tissue that would allow him to begin to remove as much of the nervous tissue as he could rescue from this body.  He used only the best of blades, and blood took long seconds to begin welling from his first incision.

Dr. Parker Singh opened his patient with the skill of long practice, slowly paring away the unnecessary and saving only the elements that he most wished to keep.  The Chief Inspector had requested a new body, and had paid Singh well to ensure that he would get one.  That and the threat of Marigold’s disappointment if the procedure failed had proved more than convincing enough; Dr. Singh had made a lucrative profession of cutting people and staying quiet about it, and he had no desire to change that.  He enjoyed the feel of flesh parting beneath his knife, and for a moment he lost himself in the sense that he was sculpting something new.  He already had the new host body prepared, her cranial cavity and sections of her spine opened to accept the transplant while his nearly silent machines kept her body in a cool approximation of life.

The procedure progressed with little difficulty.  As always, the worst part came as he was forced to drill and cut open the skull, reduced to using powered tools that buzzed and whined through the bone.  He never enjoyed the moment when he had to turn to such things, with their innate sense of disconnection from the slick movement through tissue that he so treasured with his knives.  The sense of connection as he lifted the Inspector’s brain from his skull and slid it into the waiting skull of his new body nearly made it all worth it.  Her new body, the doctor supposed, making the gentle and minute adjustments to the trailing nerves as he aligned them with the waiting and exposed portions of the woman’s nerves.

He made a rapid series of injections to promote the joining and regrowth of the nervous tissue, and then he set the removed flap of scalp and skull back in place, sealing it.  Several weeks of rest, with a gradual retraining program to allow the Inspector to learn her new body, and he would see yet another client satisfied.  Singh looked regretfully at the now emptied man’s body, wishing that his instructions hadn’t been so specific.  Sighing, he took up a set of cheap tools he’d acquired for the purpose and began to desecrate the body.  The final dissection would be done by thugs in an alley, alerted by a discrete tip to their chop-shop’s procurers, but it wouldn’t do for them to find a body which had been so clearly operated upon.  Three hard chops with the cleaver, and the empty head rolled on the slab.  Just another victim of Marigold’s reign of terror.