I thought this was real at first.

Me too. It took me few paragraphs at least. The speed of progress is such and the description of the technology obfuscated enough that I honestly thought: ”Wait, what? We can do what now?”

I wondered if it was something from a really good LLM.

I'm tempted to give K2 or Gemini 3 a basic outline and ask it to generate a story of similar length, and see how it compares. And I'm reluctant to do that for the same reason the protagonist was reluctant to help her patient see dead people: what if it works too well?