The congressman tied to the chair with his body and mind translucent to the vivisecting glare of a hundred sensors was an amoral racist, a power-hungry near-sociopath. But he knew he needed the doctor. To be in the chair was his part of a deal he still thought was convenient to maintain even if the doctor was a woman and a paki.
After the doctor calibrated everything to her satisfaction she uploaded a new program to the highly experimental illegal device she had installed inside the congressman’s brain two election cycles ago. She found no pleasure in the resulting seizures; she had known the man when he was ambitious yet decent.
The seizures ended. The man in the chair was again the man he had been. Too ambitious to be satisfied with anything less than power. Too decent to achieve it in the arena he wanted to.
Not too decent to change that.
The doctor analyzed the fresh data gathered during the phase transition between one limbic infrastructure and the other. Every time she moved him in either direction she learned more about the neural architecture of empathy, perhaps the soul, than anybody else before. More than she could publish without professional ostracism or outright jail. That didn’t matter.
She no longer talked during those moments. She was too focused on making sure the measurements and data were correctly gathered. He was lost inside himself, defenseless against the guilt of the things he had done and voted for. They had unspokenly decided to keep him tied through the process although there was no longer anything in her laboratory that he could use to try to kill himself.
Half an hour later the rent the congressman paid for his bespoke soul had been collected once more and it was time to reprogram the device. He was crying then as he did every time. He never told her not to do it. She wasn’t herself sure if she would have stopped if he had.
After the seizures the man left as soon as he could move, sneering and contemptuous of the both of them. The doctor let him go without comment or interest. She had built a device for herself to shut down her guilt until her work was done, but she hadn’t yet found a surgeon she trusted to install it and every week it felt less urgent.