"As far as I can tell, it's specifically in the optic nerve. At any rate I haven't found it in any others yet. Hmm, let's see..." She cuts into the eye at the far end of this specific wire, to see how the wire interfaces with it.

A small, very small black disk, with a number of copper pins is embedded into some sort of thin metallic membrane woven into the retina. It takes careful and methodical peeling to get a good look at it, its silvery, with an odd texture, the membrane is spotted with circular depressions in a regular pattern.

"...This looks... familiar," she muses. "A little. It feels like I should know what it means, but I don't."

The device offers no explanation, sitting quietly between tweezer prongs.

Equally silent is Ellen's assistant, who has nothing to add to this remark. The lightbulbs buzz softly overhead, and blood drips onto the metal floor.

She wants a closer look. She has a very irritating just-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue feeling about what the right tool is for getting a closer look. She tries leaning in and squinting but that is just not close enough. Eventually she just does her best to separate the metal and—the black stuff, what's the word—from the rest of the eye without damaging them so she can maybe study their structure later, and then moves back to the skull to snip a bunch of wires and clear out enough eyeballs to make a foray into the socket. What does the hub of all this copper look like? Let's find out.

A magnifying glass enters Ellen's peripheral vision.

"Oh, of course! Thank you." She picks up one of the eyeballs she just deforested and opens it up the same way she did with the other one—is it the same structure inside? If so, now she has a magnifying glass and she can take a proper squint at it.

They do. The metallic membranes appear to be delicate and woven between the back layers of the eye. Extracting it without damaging it is a matter of carefully cutting a circle around it, then peeling the back of the eye off and sever some tiny nerves that go through equally small nerves going through equally tiny holes in the silvery surface. Its a tedious and annoying process, but Ellen manages to gently peel off the metal without breaking it. The tiny black disk it is connected to comes off with a bit of wiggling. The magnifying glass reveals a complex structure of thin lines running through the membrane, spreading radially from the center, leading to where the little black disk was connected to it.

"It's clearly related to vision somehow," she muses. "But most creatures don't have stuff like this in their eyes, I'm fairly sure. So what does it do? Hmmm..."

She carefully sets down the freed membrane and takes up her tools of skull excavation once more.