text: She lay out the instruments with the utmost care, making sure each one lined up with the other in parallel. It was a simple operation; she could do it with her eyes shut - and in fact she had. It was only a few years previously that the hijacking of the REM cycles had been discovered, but with the imminent need for more microbinarial surgeons it had quickly been used to train applicants to a place of competency. In the adjacent room, the patient’s head slumped backwards. In only a matter of seconds, the sodium compound had permeated his skin, and worked its way to his heart - from where it was being pumped through every artery and capillary in his body. The effects had been nearly instantaneous. The anaesthetist watched over the happenings but did not react, for all was going as expected. The implant was, with tweezers and an exceedingly steady hand, teased out of the viscous liquid under which it was kept. It had to be activated before it could be placed inside the temporal lobe of the brain, to the left of the lateral fissure. The process was automatic. A brief reaction with the oxygen in the air, and the implant glowed a muddy orange, as the electrical current produced was absorbed and then conserved for future use. The patient was wheeled in and positioned next to the operating table. Without hesitation she pulled the machine over his head and placed her chin on the rest to look into the eyepiece. She watched as the machine bore a small hole in his skull and then retracted from over him. Without delay, she set about preparing to insert the device. The chip was clamped with fine tongs and lowered in through the hole. Once in position, the surgeon released the horizontal pressure from the tongs, leaving the implant nestled snuggly in place. She quickly pasted over the cranial orifice with artificial bone. The skin was replaced with an identical, newly grown patch, and a cream was rubbed into the new skin. Hair would grow by morning. And by the morning following that, the patient would have no recollection of the operation at all. Beatrice was a moral woman - as moral as anyone else; however, her morals couldn’t stretch as far as five million credits. She stood, uneasily, in her operating theatre, every so often glancing cautiously over her left shoulder toward the door, and then back at the sheet of paper which had been spewed, inexplicably, from her printer the prior morning. Had it not been for the advanced million credits proving to be legitimate, Beatrice would have shredded the A4 sheet without second thought. Money was freedom. Beatrice tried not to consider what her conspirator was planning on using the implants for, once whoever it was had control of them. The message had told her that it was ‘for good’, but she doubted that. Either way, she would be far away before they could do any harm - if that was what they wanted. The instructions they had given her seemed simple enough, and Beatrice doubted that they would even work - after all she’d never heard of access to the implants through the hospital computer network. Even so, with the thought of an early retirement heavy in the front of her mind, she quickly opened a command terminal and started to write the commands given to her. They sounded bogus, but the writer of the letter had proven their legitimacy, so she continued without hesitation. She was finished and with one swift motion brought her index finger down toward the enter key, but in that instant, something fired in her brain. Something powerful took hold of her, controlling her motion and halting her action. It froze her in her place. A voice. ‘We are in control now Beatrice.