"Doctor" George Prescott

The work that Doctor George Prescott did in Macau wasn't strictly legal. In fact, Doctor George Prescot wasn't strictly a doctor. Oh, he had been, conducting ground breaking research, developing world-changing and life-saving techniques, but then those snooty regulators from the College of Physicians looked into his methods and labelled him as "unsafe" and "unethical".

And so George Prescott sold his house in Toronto, packed up his things, and moved to Macau. The government in China never officially endorsed his research, but they at least got out of his way. George figured that they could see the obvious military applications of being able to transplant the mind of one person into another body. They probably envisioned sleeper agents placed all over the world, creating chaos, stealing secrets, starting wars.

George had enough on his conscious already. He didn't want to be part of starting a war, so he kept any major breakthroughs out oft he hands of the state. It wasn't actually that difficult. He opened a small clinic to help pay his bills, but any major research and surgery attempts happened off-site in a cleaned up warehouse. So far, after so many tries, he'd finally gotten the technique right. One of his patients had lived! It was a miracle!

Well, maybe not a miracle. Doctor George didn't believe in those. Genius, though, was something he could get behind. He began to slip into a daydream, the Nobel Prize being handed to him before an adoring audience. Wild applause, flowers were thrown, women offered themselves to him...

The procedure to safe Don had been complicated. To avoid having to live on anti-rejection medications, Doctor George had administered a bone-marrow transplant. Then he had opened up both of their skulls. Then last, but not least, Doctor George had separated the two higher brains from the lower brains, discarding Xue Li's brain, replacing it with Don's. Attaching the man's higher brain to the woman's lower brain had been incredibly difficult. A million things could go wrong. But they didn't.

So what happens now? Having never made it this far before, he wasn't sure.

Doctor George had left the lower brain intact for one big reason. It was responsible for all the **** things that needed to happen to keep a body alive. Imagine what would happen if suddenly Xue Li's body didn't know how to beat its heart. The experiment would be over prematurely, another patient lost. This compromise had been reached early into his research, after losing only four patients.

The rest of the patients had died due to brain ****. Something inevitably went wrong attaching the two parts of the brain, and the higher brain just couldn't survive. The body always lived on a bit longer, but in the long run it was disposed of.

Now that he had a viable patient, Doctor George wondered what long-term effects the transplant would have. The obvious effect, of course, was that Don would be alive rather than dead. But beside that, what else could happen? He worried about unforseen things. There were so many things that he didn't know about the brain. There had been plenty of studies done on it, but a lot of it still left researchers guessing. What role did the spine play in personality? How far did the lower brain go in maintaining **** actions? How would the inter-mingling of the higher and lower brains affect the development of new synapses? How would that inform new behaviours?

All of this would be fascinating to study, but alas he was going to lose his star patient soon. Doctor George might be unethical, but condemning Don to a life of prostitution in order to get the data he wanted was crossing a line. Besides, the lifestyle would only serve to ruin the study. There would be no way he could see what was environmentally informed changes, and what was physiologically informed.

And so, after sixteen years of self-imposed exile, Doctor George had decided to go home. He'd already bought his ticket, and now he was packing his bags. Staying close to Don and Mike would be the most important thing. He could sell them on the idea because of Don's surgery, stating that he would need to be close in case something weird happened. Doctor George's mouth began to drool thinking of how much he would learn, how it would inform his next project. If he could figure out what had gone right with Don, if he could map out what changes should be expected, George could duplicate the success over and over. He would be rich beyond his wildest dreams. And George's dreams got pretty wild.