American Evil God, starting with the American rebel leader raising poisonous insects.

Chapter 123 Maru! He was slain!

Metropolitan Hospital, New York, seventh floor of the surgical building.

Stephen Strange stood in the hallway, watching two technicians push a piece of equipment into the preparation room.

The device is about two meters high and one and a half meters wide, with a matte white outer shell and a single curved glass observation window on the front.

Multiple robotic arms can be seen behind the window, but the end tools have not yet been installed and the joints are in a retracted state.

A technician in blue overalls is checking the equipment list.

Strange watched for a moment, then turned to ask Paul Winston, who was standing next to him.

Winston, 42, is the hospital's head of health insurance affairs, primarily responsible for negotiating rates with insurance companies.

Strange wasn't familiar with him; he'd only seen him a few times at the monthly case review meetings.

"What is this?"

Winston held a cup of coffee in one hand and his phone in the other.

He looked up, glanced at the equipment, and then at Strange.

"To replace our machines."

He took a sip of coffee and added, "Oh, by the way, bro, you've been having a series of major surgeries lately, so you probably haven't noticed."

Strange definitely didn't see it.

He has performed nine surgeries in the past two weeks, five of which were complex cases transferred from other states.

Last night's skull base tumor resection lasted eleven hours, ending at four in the morning.

He slept for three hours in the duty room, and then came back at nine o'clock to check the preoperative images for the day.

Winston turned the phone screen towards him.

A video is playing on the screen.

This is the first demonstration of Johns Hopkins University's Nemisel AI.

It looks like science fiction.

"This is----"

Strange had heard of Messiah AI.

However, he was calculating his taxes at the time, otherwise his luxurious lifestyle would have been ruined.

Winston put his phone away.

"Forget it, come and see. You'll understand soon enough; you're much smarter than me."

They followed the equipment into the No. 3 sterile preparation room.

The technicians began the installation.

Connect to power, access the hospital's intranet, and mount the sterile tool tray.

The tool tray contains more than thirty different sizes of blades, tweezers, scissors, suction tips, bipolar electrocautery tweezers, and microsurgical needles.

Installation took 22 minutes.

The final step is the power-on self-test.

The equipment emitted a soft hum, and the robotic arm inside the glass window sequentially extended, flexed, and rotated. The tool at the end of the arm picked up and lowered.

An electronic female voice announced: "Ding, mechanical self-check complete, normal operation is now possible."

The sound is Hatsune Miku's sound library.

Strange frowned.

At that moment, the door to the preparation room was pushed open.

The hospital's CEO, George Frankie, walked in, accompanied by a young man in a dark gray suit who looked to be under thirty.

The young man wore a Noah Technology employee badge around his neck.

Franky's eyes lit up when he saw Strange.

"Oh, Dr. Strange! Perfect timing. Coming here will give you a better view of how this machine works and allow you to provide your professional assessment."

He walked over, naturally took Strange's arm, and led him to the best spot in front of the observation window.

The young man from Noah Technology nodded to Strange without saying a word.

Strange said, "Okay."

Three minutes later, the patient was wheeled in.

The patient is a 54-year-old male whose medical record states "drug-resistant lobar epilepsy".

The patient has a 12-year medical history, with four to six attacks per month for the past three years. During the most recent attack, the patient fell down the stairs, resulting in a fracture of the left arm.

Preoperative imaging showed that the epileptic focus was concentrated in the medial aspect of the right metaphysical lobe, involving the amygdala and the anterior hippocampus.

The standard procedure is anterior lobe resection plus amygdalae and hippocampal resection.

The difficulty of the surgery lies in:

The goal is to preserve the language function of the lateral cortex of the topical lobe while completely removing the medial epileptic focus, without damaging the adjacent optic radiation tract, branches of the posterior cerebral artery, or the brainstem.

Strange himself performed seven such surgeries.

His average surgery time is three hours and forty minutes, and his complication rate is among the top five percent in the United States.

The patient was immobilized, anesthetized, disinfected, and draped.

Frankie gestured for him to stay in front of the observation window.

The robotic arm begins to move.

The first arm raised the craniotomy drill and marked three drilling points on the skull.

Drill a hole, use a milling cutter to remove the bone flap, and expose the dura mater.

The second arm was fitted with microscopic scissors and forceps to cut open the dura mater, and the temporal lobe was gently lifted with a retractor.

The third arm enters.

The arm is equipped with a bipolar electrocoagulation and ultrasonic aspirator.

It separates forward along the venous fissures on the inner side of the lobe, electrocoagulates to cut off small blood supply vessels, and removes a small amount of cerebrospinal fluid.

Strange looked at the screen.

The screen is divided into four parts:

The main surgical field microscope image, real-time neuronavigation imaging, vital signs monitoring, and robotic arm pressure feedback curve.

The robotic arm moves very smoothly.

There is no physiological tremor in the human hand.

When separating the head of the hippocampus, it is necessary to avoid the oculomotor nerve below and the cerebral peduncle behind.

The robotic arm paused for 0.3 seconds, adjusted its angle, and then continued.

The excision is complete.

The robotic arm places the extracted tissue into a specimen bag.

The bleeding was stopped on the fourth arm, and the surgical field was rinsed.

The fifth arm was used for dura mater suturing.

The whole process took one hour and seven minutes.

No blood transfusion was given.

The patient's vital signs are stable.

After the robotic arm automatically cleans itself, it retracts and enters standby mode.

Strange did not speak.

He stared at the postoperative navigation images on the screen:

The resection area perfectly matched the preoperative plan, with clear margins and intact surrounding important structures.

Frankie clapped his hands.

"Haha! This is the new medical device jointly developed by Noah Technology and Johns Hopkins University!"

"Although it's said that a complete restoration of the brain is not yet possible, almost all current surgical procedures can be performed!"

He turned to Strange, beaming, "And our Metropolitan Hospital has officially introduced this machine! You'll have a much easier time from now on!"

Strange felt something ringing in his ears.

It sounded like the flow of blood, or like a distant alarm.

He was forty-three years old.

He graduated first in his class from Harvard Medical School.

He honed his skills with minimal case practice.

After becoming a chief surgeon, he performed more than 50 surgeries every year, 40% of which were level 3 or 4 complex surgeries.

His hands were very steady.

Even under extreme fatigue, he can still perform vascular anastomosis with a diameter of 0.5 mm under a microscope.

He believed it was irreplaceable.

But now he was looking at that white machine.

The machine stood quietly in the sterile room, its robotic arms retracted to its sides, like some kind of arthropod in hibernation.

He glanced at the other people in the room.

Frankie was still talking to the young people at Noah Technology, his tone excited.

Winston leaned against the wall, looking down at his phone.

Two anesthesia nurses were tidying up the equipment, their expressions were normal.

A resident doctor stood in the corner, looking at the machine with a mixture of curiosity and unease on his face.

Strange took a breath to catch his breath.

The air smelled of disinfectant, along with a very faint scent of lubricating oil.

He said, "George, I'm going back now."

Frankie turned his head: "Huh? How about we take a simple ride together later—"

Strange had already turned and walked out of the preparation room.

He walked through the corridor, entered the doctors' elevator, and pressed the button for the second basement level.

The elevator is going down.

He took off his surgical cap and scratched his hair.

Back in the office, I locked the door.

He sat down at the computer, opened the hospital's internal payroll system, and entered his employee number.

The screen displays his estimated income for this year:

The base salary is $420,000, the surgical performance bonus is $680,000 to $750,000, and the academic allowance is $80,000.

The total is approximately one million two hundred thousand US dollars.

Before tax.

He opened another webpage, logged into his bank account, and checked the property tax: $200,000.

Car loan balance: 120,000.

Student loan: 100,000.

Credit card debt: 60,000.

He is 43 years old this year.

If all goes well, he plans to pay off all his debts by age 55 and then retire at 65.

Now he looks at these numbers.

Then he opened a search engine and entered "Miscell AI Surgical Promotion Program".

The first search result was a press release from Noah Holdings.

The article states that the company has received Breakthrough Device designation from the FDA and plans to deploy the first batch of 100 systems in 50 large teaching hospitals across the United States by the second quarter of next year.

The rental fee for each system is $800,000 per year, or the outright purchase price is $3.5 million.

The calculation model is located at the bottom of the manuscript:

Based on the calculation of 400 surgeries per year, the marginal cost per surgery will be reduced to less than 30% of the traditional labor cost.

Strange closed the webpage.

He stood up and walked to the window.

Outside the window are the streets of New York, where cars move slowly and pedestrians walk with their heads down.

He remembered the machine from earlier.

The robotic arm moves with precision, stability, and tirelessness.

I will not ask for a raise.

I won't ask for leave.

They won't make mistakes.

He picked up the phone on the table and dialed the hospital's surgery scheduling office.

"This is Strange. Please check my surgery schedule for next week."

The sound of keyboard clicking could be heard from the other end of the phone.

"You have eleven surgeries scheduled for next week. Monday at 2 PM is the second pineal region tumor surgery, Wednesday at 8 AM is the basilar artery aneurysm clipping surgery, and Friday is three epileptic surgeries plus one —"

"Cancel."

"What?"

"Cancel everything. I have something to do."

He hung up the phone.

I sat back down in my chair.

Place your hands on your knees.

My fingers trembled slightly.

It's not fatigue, it's not illness.

It's a feeling of emptiness.

It's like standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down and seeing the rocks beneath your feet crumbling.

He closed his eyes.

Open your eyes after three seconds.