"That's right." Lee was becoming more and more uncomfortable. The extensive examinations had tired him, and repetition of the answers to all these questions was making him edgy.
"Doctor, can't you at least tell me what type operation I'm going to have?"
"What do you think it will be?"
"I don't know. Some sort of repair on my head, I guess."
"Mr. Lee, this isn't going to be a matter of repair. We have found it necessary to replace the entirety of what could roughly be called your 'brain', as well as part of the spinal cord."
"My whole brain?" Lee sat, stunned, comprehension slowly filtering into him. He voiced the only coherent thought which materialized. "Why that will mean there won't be anything left of me at all."
Dr. Letzmiller regarded him. "What do you mean?"
"Doc, you've got my records there. At one time or another, since they first put a new heart in me, every single inch of me has been replaced by an artificial part. I mean all of me. There's not one bit of me, heart, eyes, toenails, nothing, that is me. That bothered me quite a bit when this left eye was put in. I mean I thought, 'Well, this isn't me. This is my brain walking around in a jumble of artificial flesh.' I tell you it bothered me. But I went to a doctor, you know, a psychoanalyst, and he convinced me that as long as I had what he called a 'sense of identity', that I was me." Lee stopped. How could he explain it?
But Letzmiller seemed to understand. "And you think that your brain is all that is left of 'you'?"
"Doc, it's a funny feeling. Like this." Lee raised his hands, brought them together and touched his fingertips. "See that? I can raise those hands. I can make them touch each other. I can feel them touching each other. But it is just not quite right. It's just a little bit off key, like one trumpet player out of twenty being about one-sixteenth of a note flat. Know what I mean?"