Here's the opening of a story I work on when I get writer's block on the Kinshield series. :)
Dr. Benjamin Sykes sat beside a hospital bed in room one in the Forsyth Labs' surgical ward with a notebook computer in front of him. The man who lay still, an anonymous victim of a car-pedestrian accident over a year ago, responded to neither Ben's presence nor the soft tapping of his fingers on the keyboard. Not yet. If all went well, he would awaken soon.
The patient was a Hispanic John Doe about Ben's age -- mid-thirties. Average-looking fellow with brown hair and eyes. No one had claimed him. The police had searched the missing persons reports for a man matching his description and came up empty.
For thirteen months, the man they'd nicknamed John W. Doe, the thirty-third such anonymous victim in 2024, had lain in a persistent vegetative state; he had normal reflex movements but demonstrated no higher cognitive function. The taxpayers had financed his medical treatment at the county hospital for twelve months, the government-mandated maximum limit for state-funded care of unidentified patients. The surgeon general declared that patients in this state for a year had only a .1% chance of recovering, and so the state opted to pay for a casket and grave plot rather than another day of care for the hapless victim. Minutes before they were going to administer a lethal injection to end this John Doe's life, Ben's boss, Dr. Pamela Forsyth, convinced some pencil-pusher high enough on the food chain to give Ben's radical new treatment a chance. That was three weeks ago, and the surgery had gone off without a hitch.
Now came the moment of truth.
What do you think? Interesting enough to keep reading, or should I work on the opening a bit more?
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