The Adventures Of Angelica And Friends

by GrandpaJoeProductionFanfiction

Set 23 years after my one-shot "The Afterlife." When a group of high-ranking Separatists need a new member for their elite organization, one of them suggests a girl who has been dead for over two decades. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, the group revives the girl. But in a twist of fate, the girl ends up being a little more than the group can chew.

4. Cheap Chinese Steel

Once Ronald and the scientists reached the room where the procedure was unfolding, they waited until around two-thirty in the morning to extract Angelica from the bacta tank. Ronald watched Angelica's corpse being pulled out of the viscous material after Liang pressed a button controlling the machine the wires were attached too. The machine brought Angelica back to the table where she was worked on hours before. After the machine lowered the body, Chen and Luo sat it up so Liang could disconnect the wires that wrapped around her chest. The bacta stopped the decaying process, leaving Angelica with flaps of loose skin all over her upper body. The skin on her legs had mostly decayed to the point where the bones were beginning to break.

Liang extracted the brain and the vocal cords from their individual bacta tanks and handed them over to the assistant to take them to the cybernetics team. Their job would be to fill the missing parts of the brain and vocal cords with small machinery that would make them function like before she died. Ronald observed as the team of scientists scraped away all of the remaining skin, leaving Angelica's bare skeleton. The time had come to reconstruct Angelica; a camera mounted to the roof was pulled down to where her body way lying in order to scan her most important features. This scan would create a computer-generated image that when combined with images of the Angelica during life would serve as a guide during the reconstruction.

As Liang began repairing Angelica's broken leg by cutting off the damaged part and replacing it with a piece of metal, Ronald commented, "You better not be using that cheap Chinese steel."

"Don't worry, Dr. Boxwood, you and I both know that Chinese materials are only used when profits are a concern," Liang assured Ronald.

The same process that occurred with the leg happened throughout the body. Various bones were cut off and replaced with a piece a metal because they had begun to decay before the bacta treatment and were quite fragile. Ronald counted over thirty pieces of metal, and that wasn't counting the big dome that would cover her skull. The biggest one was a back brace made out of two robotic arms that in theory could tear through the skin and act as additional limbs. Ronald thought that an event requiring Angelica to have more than two limbs was unlikely to happen, but he let them be implanted. Once he finished repairing all of the weak bones, Liang began laying out several small servers that were all connected by microwires thinner than a strand of hair. The function of these servers and microwires were to serve as the "nervous system," they would relay information from the brain to the several muscles, organs, and cybernetic implants the servers would be connected to.

When a member of the cybernetics team returned the brain and vocal cords to the team of scientists, Ronald pointed at them and asked, "What did you do to them?"

Liu Xiuying, a woman in her early thirties who had defied Chinese cultural standards by focusing on her career instead of getting married, pointed at the servers and said, "These servers right here will serve as motivators, they will make the rest of the brain work. We uploaded all the information Unit 61398 found us. We did the same for the vocal cords; Unit 61398 was able to find an old video on her father's computer. The videos were converted into a digital format since they were taken in the 1990's. The quality was not as adequate as we had hoped for, but we got the vocal cords to produce a sound similar to her original voice."

Unit 61398 was a faction of the PLA that focuses of hacking, while their usual victims are large corporations they made an exception this time and hacked the computers of Angelica's relatives and searched them for any information pertaining to the deceased girl. The information gathered in the cyber-attack helped reengineer the vocal cords, fill the servers in the brain with enough information to stimulate "appropriate" brain activity, and help create a map for the facial reconstruction process.

Liang connected two thin tubes to the brain, slid the brain into the brain cavity, sealed the top of the skull with the metal dome, and began to connect the wires he laid out to the sever at the bottom of the brainstem, creating an artificial nervous system. Luo brought over a pair of artificial eyes with cameras where the lens would be in real eyes. The irises of these prosthetic eyes were cerulean blue, the eye color she had in life and the eye color of her mother. Angelica's mother was not the woman who was currently married to her father, a woman whose eyes were a lighter shade of blue, but a woman who died over three and a half decades ago. Liang connected the microwires of the eyes to the server at the brainstem; the body looked like a skeleton with two bright blue eyes peering back at you.