Drood busied himself in preparation, the beginnings of ‘Last Morning of the Siege’ an opera by Balundikrantz filtering into the operating theatre through the speakers. The slight spaceborn man had always enjoyed the genre and the composer was one of his favourites. Other types of music, other artists, they came and went, each but a momentary favourite. Their fame was predicated not on the quality of the work, but on the potential for their makers to stay afloat in the ever churning rapids of celebrity. But not opera, not it. Opera was timeless. And not many did it well. The piece he listened to now as he put on his apron was over 300 years old and it inspired him as much today as it likely did it’s creator back then.

Though he came from a family of morticians, Jeketakrees Drood was a man of numerous talents. True, he learned the trade of his forefathers at the feet of his own, but he was the first, and to this date only, member of his clan to study at the prestigious Durvanding Medical School on Tampris Prime. He was voracious in his pursuit of knowledge, even as a youth. He had decided to specialize in two separate fields of study at the institution, surgery and pharmacology. Growing up in an environment that changed the body over time and forced a drug dependency upon those that had should they ever be planetside for a prolonged period of time had made him naturally curious about both. And while he certainly could immerse himself in those things while making comfortable the dead, the bald, slightly blue tinged man wanted to work with the living as well.

He flexed the fingers of his cybernetic hands in readiness, listening to the music in the background gradually build. These, themselves had been his first grand experiment even though he, naturally, had not been the one to perform the procedure. He had watched the ad for Cybermed in a holojournal for physicians and while it had intrigued him, his musings had horrified others. Normally such things were only fitted to those who had suffered some misfortune in life that had denied them their own and he was perfectly healthy. But he had looked into it thoroughly and trusted his judgment.

And he had been proven correct in the end. The increase in precision when operating he found, was remarkable, though his now improved abilities had cost him dearly within his social strata. When he had shown up for graduation with the dedication to his craft now on permanent display, the revulsion he had felt from those he had once called friends was palatable. But Drood had always had a philosophical bent to his thinking. He understood that in the greater weave of existence, the quest for knowledge and understanding would always outweigh that of popularity and status.

He glanced at the small alcove in the wall that housed a jar containing his original hands floating in liquid presevatin. It was both a reminder of his where he had come from and how far he had travelled in his life since then. He then turned and smiled at the motionless man on the table staring lifelessly upwards and he reflected on how they had come to cross paths.