Bios

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The regulator lay deep in the flesh of the girl’s upper arm, a pale egg in a capillary nest. Anna Chopra pared away the tissue with careful strokes of the hemostatic scalpel. Her small, expert hands wanted to tremble. She willed them to be steady.

This was, she knew, an act of sabotage. She was performing a surgical intervention without consent; worse, she was interfering with an instrument of the Trusts. Violating the law, if not, perhaps, her Hippocratic oath.

She was alone with the unconscious and sedated girl, and that had been part of the temptation. In any operating theater on Earth, she would have been surrounded by colleagues and students. On Earth, one was always surrounded. Here, at least for the moment, she was surrounded only by mute machinery and surgical tools dangling on coiled wire in the near-weightless environment. No audience, hence no witnesses: she was trustworthy, or so the Trusts believed.

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