The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5 by Jefferson Bass

“routine”—complex microsurgery was required to stitch together the network of delicate blood vessels and nerves—but it had been performed hundreds of times during the past few decades, with a success rate of well over 90 percent.
    “Let’s change the search,” he said. “See what you find using ‘myoelectric prosthesis’ and ‘bionic hand’
    as search terms.” The technical term—a reference to the use of electrical impulses from muscles in the arm to trigger electric switches and motors in an artificial hand—produced about a hundred thousand hits. The much catchier “bionic hand” yielded over three hundred thousand, including thumbnail-size photos and sketches. Miranda clicked on one of the images, a robotic-looking prosthesis called the i-Hand.
    Miranda leaned closer to the monitor. “Ooh, that’s kinda sexy,” she remarked, studying the photo. The i-Hand’s fingers were formed of pale white plastic, translucent enough to reveal bonelike metal rods in the fingers, as well as hinges and tiny motors. According to several articles, the i-Hand was the first prosthetic hand to faithfully mirror the structures and movements of the human hand. One video clip showed a young woman with an i-Hand lifting bags of groceries, picking up a set of car keys, and typing on a computer keyboard. Her bionic hand was covered with a flesh-toned “skin” of rubber. “I like it better without the skin.” Miranda frowned. “Much more futuristic-looking.”
    “Yes,” Garcia agreed, “very Luke Skywalker. But I suspect that the rubber provides a better grip than the hard plastic. It probably also protects the mechanism from things that could damage it. Dirt. Sharp edges. Coca-Cola.”
    “Embalming fluid,” I added, thinking of the body we’d just examined. “Blood.”
    “Oh,fine, ” Miranda retorted with mock indignation. “Go ahead, rain on my style parade, see if I care.”
    She wiggled the fingers of one hand, then folded all of them except her middle finger. “I assume the i-Hand is capable of making this gesture, with or without the skin.” Garcia asked her to bookmark several of the i-Hand links, then asked if she’d search one more topic. “Sure,” she replied. “What?”
    “Total hand transplantation.” He said it quietly, but I heard an edge of hope and anxiety in his voice that I hadn’t heard earlier, when he’d asked for the other searches.
    Miranda’s fingers clattered. “Wow,” she breathed, “almost a million hits.” Garcia had her call up only a few of the million, but those were enough to confirm my prior impressions. Hand-transplant surgery was relatively new; the first total transplant had been attempted in Ecuador in 1964, but it didn’t work, and the procedure had been attempted only a few more times until the late 1990s. Even now it remained incredibly rare—so far, fewer than fifty hand transplants had been performed in the entire world. The surgery was extraordinarily complex, requiring surgeons to connect dozens of nerves, tendons, veins, arteries, and muscles. The operation was both an intricately choreographed ballet and a brutal test of endurance, requiring delicate, nonstop work for twelve to sixteen hours. Even if the surgery itself went perfectly, the long-term outcome was far from certain. To keep their immune systems from rejecting the transplants, recipients had to take immunosuppressants—drugs to weaken their immune systems—for the rest of their lives, and the immunosuppressants increased their vulnerability to diseases. Total hand transplantation looked like a medical miracle, no doubt about it. But I couldn’t help thinking how much riskier it looked than either the toe-to-thumb reconstruction or the prosthesis.
    “It’s a big risk,” Garcia said, as if hearing my thoughts. “But it would be worth taking a big risk to have real hands again.”
    His words stayed with me long after I drove back to the stadium and Miranda had wheeled him back upstairs