Angela is indulging her sister's wish to watch some obnoxiously pink movie at two minutes past Friday midnight when Father bursts into the girl's similarly pink room.
"There's been an attack in Oslo."
She shares a glance with Brigitte, then they both bolt out the bed and downstairs to turn on the TV, where they are soon joined by their parents.
It's chaos. Only minutes have passed since explosions rocked the Norwegian capital, and nobody quite knows what's going on yet - not that it stops anyone on the news channels from talking about it. Thankfully, there appears to be at least one sliver of truth buried amid the sea of asinine noise regarding the attack; namely, that it's already over. A fact soon confirmed by Father, when he comes back from the kitchen where he went to take a call.
"They hit our facilities."
Ours? "You mean Overwatch?" Angela makes sure to confirm.
"So we assume. There's no contact with any of the staff on site. Surveillance is out, too."
"Oh." Angela falls back into her seat, from which she unknowingly leaned forward. "Shouldn't we be doing… something?" she asks once the man settles back down next to his wife.
"Like what? Half of Watchpoint Gotland is already on the way and they'll get there long before we could. …Just in time to stand around and look pretty." He adds with a huff.
"I'm a doctor." She responds simply, rubbing her wings against the backrest to alleviate the itch. There's never a shortage of things to do for people like her in a crisis.
"And you're not the only one. It's Oslo. Let other people do their jobs." His eyes soften. "I'm sure they'll call you if they need you."
And so, Angela settles in for a wait, anxiously browsing the web for news with the TV feed in the background all the while. Father only somewhat exaggerated when he said half of the fortress island of Gotland - humanity's adamantine bastion in the Baltic - took off for Oslo. It seems the Swedish fleet joined their Norwegian and Danish allies in shutting down all possible routes of departure from the peninsula, and the army is similarly setting up roadblocks right as she's reading about the ongoing manhunt. The entire Scandinavian airspace is closing down for departures, too. Unless the culprits escaped by the sea immediately following their attack, they're now effectively trapped.
When messaged, Athena doesn't reply for three entire minutes - a first which forces Angela out of her armchair to pace around the house, lest the pins and needles blooming beneath her skin find their way out. When the reply finally does come, it's a singular word:
busy
It's a good few seconds before her mind can register the meaning. Because busy? Athena? She knows, of course, that her friend must be working right now, and with an intensity which would quite literally rupture the human brain. But Athena isn't human. An artificial mind is not constrained to a single instance of thought at a time. In Athena's case, this means handling dozens of tasks at any given moment; usually consisting of running at least surveillance and never-ending troubleshooting of her own code. Need be, she can easily extend this to operate hundreds more processes without trouble. Need be, thousands.
For her to be so burdened she couldn't, or wouldn't spare a single subroutine for her inquiry? Just how hot must her servers be running? Could she also be under attack?
Angela halts in writing her reply, forcing her hands to still and mind to catch up with them. If the AI were in any immediate danger she wouldn't have written back at all. For one, she knows better than to do so. For the other, she shouldn't be able to. Her creator would've known better than to allow her. Angela certainly wouldn't. In all likelihood, she is simply doing what she was created to do at capacity - trawling through petabytes of data a second.
Let me know when you're available. She settles to write. And to wait.
As hours pass, her family one by one go back to their bedrooms. First to go, on all three adults' insistence, is Brigitte, who although offers some token resistance to the idea, is clearly finding it more and more difficult to fight off sleep after an evening spent with her older sister. Second goes Mother, asking her daughter and husband that they not spend the whole night in front of the TV. Lastly, with a resigned shake of his head, off marches Father, telling her only not to pay the news too much mind. They'll have far more accurate information come morning than the journalists will be privy to a decade from now.
It doesn't stop Angela from spending the rest of her night curled up in the armchair.
She tries not to. Not by going to bed, mind, that was never an option for her. While she can fall asleep just fine most nights, not actually being tired means it takes very little in the way of excitement to keep her up. Inevitably, what she tries is work, though it all too quickly becomes apparent she'll get very little of it done with her attention split between her research, her phone's blank screen, and the news tab she's opened first thing after starting up the computer. She'd have to spend more time reviewing her subpar efforts later than it'll take to do it properly in the first place.
Not yet defeated, Angela tries different TV channels, but as stimulating as the backstage look into canned tuna production would be on any other day, she continuously finds herself periodically switching back to SVT24 for the entirety of it, until she finally gives up the pretence and just leaves the news channel open to drone on as background to her thoughts.
Come morning, and still without a peep from Athena, Mother only sighs at the sight of her daughter still (again) curled up in the armchair, before asking if she's okay with scrambled eggs for breakfast. Rather than wait and risk losing her mind after hearing the same talking points from the same journalists for the twentieth time, Angela volunteers her help.
She bites back a hiss when the knife cuts more than just the sausage. No blood pours forth of its own volition, her nanites immediately catching on and refusing to leave her body unattended. She does, however, manage to squeeze out a tiny droplet before her skin completely reconstitutes itself.
"Everything alright?"
Angela sticks the finger into her mouth, wondering at the metallic flavour. She vaguely remembers the taste of blood all the way back from her childhood. Iron, she knows. Probably stronger now than all the way back then, what with each individual nanite carrying more of it around than ten of her own red cells could. She wonders what her own synthetic variant should taste like. She's never tried, but given it does the same job, in all likelihood, like iron still. She could take all of the element out from regular blood, though. Give that a taste.
"Angela?"
"Hm?"
"Are you okay?" Mother gives her a look that would almost certainly appear worried if not for the teary-eyed squint, courtesy of the chopped onion.
Angela takes the finger, now fully healed, out of her mouth.
"Yes, just-" Everything. Nothing. She should've gone to sleep. She couldn't have gone to sleep. She should've gone to Oslo. Could've flown to Oslo. If they needed her, they'd have called her. Is everyone alright? Is everyone already dead? How are the surgeries going? Are there any surgeries going? What is Athena doing? Is she okay? Here she is, making breakfast, while people are dying. Everywhere. All the time. Always. By the thousands.
She shrugs. Mother doesn't press.
It doesn't get better when Father joins them downstairs, the man having actually been on the phone since waking up alongside his wife, and only just finishing the call.
According to Mr. Reinhardt, who himself had gotten the news straight from Commander Morrison, a little-known crime syndicate by the name of Talon has been identified as the culprit behind the attack. It's the first Angela has heard of them, but to Father's telling, Overwatch's been going after them (and many like them) for a while now.
Tonight, it seems, they struck back.
Whether it's a move borne of desperation or a show of strength is yet to be determined, and the terrorists themselves have not put out a statement so far. Angela doesn't understand what they could stand to gain from either position. Whatever trouble Overwatch gave them prior to the attack is nothing compared to what's coming. Being the armed hand of the United Nations, an attack against Overwatch is effectively an attack against the whole of the world. Good riddance to them and all of their wretched kind, now that their days are numbered. There's enough suffering in life without people adding to it.
Enough suffering to stop without people adding to it.
Yet add they do, always putting up airs about how the misery they cause today will bring about a better tomorrow. In the end, and without fail, it is always up to somebody else to pick up the broken pieces left in their wake.
What an insidious idea that one can change anything for the better through destruction. Again and again it raises its hideous head, only to again and again be proven false just for the lesson never to stick. Any idiot can take a life with one pull of a trigger, but how much effort it takes to undo it. How much work and time and thought to build a house that can be torn down in a fingersnap.
How much behind every single life. All laid to waste with the ease of nothing worthwhile at all, and up to others to fix.
Up to her to fix.
Starting with the call she receives mid-through changing out of her pyjamas.
It begins, as it often does, with the deafening blast of her earphones cutting out in favour of a different voice - one far in excess synthetic to that of Hagane Miku's - uncoiling a knot in her gut of whose existence Angela only becomes aware of in its absence.
"Athena!" she exclaims, likely for all the house to hear. "What happened? Are you okay?"
"I'm fine, Angela. I'm still dealing with the situation at hand, but have deemed it under control enough to split my attention again."
What relief the words bring lasts all of the moment it takes the AI to relay the full story.
At five minutes til midnight, the security measures across all three Overwatch facilities in Oslo went out. Alarms. Cameras. Microphones. The works. The physical attack itself began, presumably, at four minutes til midnight, with the explosions registered on the city surveillance systems, and tangentially caught on a small number of private recordings besides. It was all over in the space of the following five minutes, at which point a second wave of explosions went off, destroying the local branch office, its security facilities, and severely damaging the research lab. Quick, efficient, and brutal. By the time the terrorists left, there were six corpses left in their wake.
Seven in the making, really.
"Director Liao was present in the laboratory at the time of explosion, resulting in a number of traumatic brain injuries in addition to severe burns. She's undergone a surgery and is currently in a state of coma."
Traumatic? "Traumatic how?"
"Multiple penetrating shrapnel wounds." Athena succinctly clarifies, drawing a curse from Angela. It's rare enough for people to live through a singular bullet to the brain, but also common enough to give hope. Surviving until receiving medical attention already means overcoming nine-in-ten odds. Still, even the survivors who then get lucky on the statistical coin toss almost universally suffer complications for the rest of their lives. All that from just one, tiny piece of metal.
"Can you show me?"
The slew files flooding their chat room not a second later shows very clearly it's not one tiny piece of metal they're dealing with. The after-report says the doctors managed to remove the shrapnel without causing any further injury, which, while certainly good news, is a cold kind of comfort given the damage already there. If Angela were pressed for a description, based on the scans in her possession, she'd give one of a meat slab caught on a blender.
"What's her FOUR score?" she asks, switching her phone for the tablet so she can take a better look at the brain.
"One point in motor response."
Rather than recounting with the remaining three categories, silence follows.
Angela carefully lays the device back down again, before raking her fingers over her scalp.
Mina Liao and her have never been any sort of friends. Angela will admit at least a part of that has to do with the role the woman had played in the lead-up to the war, but the same could be said of Father. The difference is, Father has seen the error of his ways and has since refused to design any more weapons than he already had; no small thing to ask of an inventor. On the inverse, Liao's unhinged obsession with omnics never so much as flickered - her silly conviction being that they have to become even more sophisticated rather than less in order to avoid another Omnic Crisis. How such a demonstrably intelligent woman came to such a dumb conclusion astounds Angela without end. Even once freed of the God Programs' control did millions of omnics continue their genocidal war. Only, they did so of their own free will, some still do - which rather proves their current solution to the omnic question correct.
But Mina Liao does not want a solution.
She's never said so outright, of course - to do so would limit her prospective employment to maintenance in a local garage, if that. However, there are only so many ways of interpreting her position. In just a few decades, with singular exceptions, the omnics will be no more. There is no need for another solution. Unless, that is, one expects more of their species to be brought into the world.
To what mad purpose is anyone's guess. It's not like these new and improved omnics would serve the goal of providing cheap labour the way their predecessors did before stumbling their way into sapience. All this would mean would be bringing yet more of a potentially hostile species into the world. A vanity project without any utility to the human race at best. More likely a catastrophe in the making, given their track record with creating intelligent life so far consists of fighting off one attempt at genocide planetside, and failing to prevent another on the Moon.
None of this is to say she ever wished the woman ill. Misguided as she is, Director Liao never set out to harm anyone, and when made to work on actual problems, with proper supervision, she's created wonders - such as the one she's speaking with right now.
"Can you help her?" Athena asks, breaking the silence, her tone such as Angela's never heard before. Like a punch in the gut.
Can she help her? She's been focusing on brains of late, true, but she's also not planned to perform live trials for some time to come, and with good reason. Then again, how much difference is there, really, between the dead and Mina Liao?
"I'd have thought you'd be the one to give me a number."
"My predictive models cannot account for miracles, Angela. Even if I can wish for one."
A pregnant silence once again descends upon her room, one only broken up by the tapping of Angela's fingers against her bouncing knee. Can she help?
"I can try." She speaks up at last, heaving her body off the bed. It's sure to bring better results than doing nothing. "Please put me through to Commander Morrison."
Athena doesn't. The Commander, it turns out, is presently in a meeting with Director Petras, which the AI has no authority to interrupt without a pending disaster. But that's fine. They're in no rush.
After all, it's not like the Director will be going anywhere.
In the meantime, she finishes getting changed while listening to Athena's tale.
To her telling, the AI's role in the ongoing manhunt is that of a coordinator between the various other, lesser thinking programs sending vast amounts of data her way to analyse. To the point she'd had to devote all of her processing power to the task. The scope of the search has since been narrowed down, allowing Athena to simultaneously check on her creator, and contact Angela as requested.
"Oh, uh- sorry." She winces. Her message did sound somewhat like an order. "I should've specified. I meant at your earliest convenience, not the very moment you could."
'It's no trouble," the AI reassures her. "Your well-being is among my top priorities. I would've checked on you the moment I could, regardless. After reviewing the data I've recovered from your household devices, I've concluded you would benefit from my presence. Your behaviour these past nine hours exhibits signs of mounting anxiety."
…Anxiety? She has been rather restless, true, but anxiety?
"Thank you?" She doesn't voice her objection. Even AIs are entitled to making mistakes should they not be given all of the relevant data, and Angela is in no mood to air the clutter in her head for so small a thing.
Especially not when said error in judgement means Athena keeping her company.
(...)
By the time Commander Morrison can finally take her call, Angela has finished reviewing all the files she received on Liao and drafted an initial treatment plan for her boss to read at his leisure. Whenever that may be, given the veritable avalanche of work he must be dealing with.
"Ziegler." His frayed voice sounds in her ears, the tone of it such that even with the signal distortion Angela can tell this won't go smoothly. "How important is it?"
She wonders, if but for a moment, how the man would react if it were any other life she were proposing to save. Less important life. No less precious life.
"I believe there's a way to save Director Liao."
"What? How do you-" Morrison abruptly cuts off. "Athena. Right. Of course. Then I'm sure you were also told Mina has already successfully undergone her surgery, and is in the best care available?"
The best care available would be provided by Angela's own hands, but she can forgive a layman for not knowing better. From his perspective, a neurosurgeon must indeed appear a sound choice for the challenge at hand. From the perspective of said neurosurgeon over in Oslo, it probably doesn't make much of a difference if it were a village quack set to the task.
"She's going to die." Angela lays the matter down in the simplest terms possible. "I'm sure you've been told there's a chance of recovery, but if I may be so candid - that's something we say to cover our bases in case of a miracle."
This much, Angela can say with complete authority. There was a time no doctor would have even bothered with a one on the FOUR scale - a single point away from death. Life support systems have since advanced in ways no less spectacular than the very first computer has to eventually result in true artificial intelligence, but for brain injuries, that still means unfortunately little.
Yes, they can keep the body operational, and the brain more or less stable, but that's about the extent of what can be done. For every other injury, it's enough to keep the patient alive and stable until either a fix or replacement can be found and implemented. Not so with the brain. Massive strides have been made in neuroscience, but as far as actual treatment goes, they can still do little better than keep the body alive and hope it'll fix itself. Sometimes, it even does.
In the other thousand cases, it does not.
"Right. Let me guess. Your work offers us a solution." The man's tone is a little hard to discern, but Angela's heard it enough to know… scepticism when she hears it.
"So it does." She chooses to simply confirm, cutting through all the unnecessary dressing. No point in indulging a spat. "As you well know, the endpoint of my research is to return a dead brain to a working condition. In essence, resurrection. Now, that's still a ways away, but, the damage we're dealing with here is actually less extensive than in the case of necrosis. More localised. And as such, far more treatable with the tools currently at my disposal."
For one, fixing regular, if extensive, trauma is much, much simpler than what brain-wide repairs on a microscopic level require of her technology. Even should entire sections of the brain be turned to mush, the rest of it will still be fine. If, say, one were to drive a knife right through the cerebral cortex and split the brain in twain, while deadly, yes, the damage would still be limited only to the thin line of the cut. A challenge to be sure; her artificial neurons are still overlarge and tend to aggravate the biological ones, but some leftover brain damage is an acceptable trade-off when the alternative is death. Necrosis, on the other hand, affects the entirety of an organ all at once. Replacing these neurons is a much more problematic proposition even if, by volume, the extent of the damage is smaller. Similar, in a way, to how extracting a drop of poison mixed in with a glass of water is more difficult than scooping a settled spoonful of it out from the bottom.
Obviously, the trauma Director Liao has suffered is far more extensive than that left behind by a clean cut, but the same principle applies. It'll be far easier to glue her brain back together, so to speak, or even replace bits and pieces of it, than to seamlessly supplant all the damaged matter of an actually dead brain. A stepping stone on the way to true resurrection. And one with much greater chances of success.
"I don't recall Mina signing up as one of your test subjects," the Commander points out. A valid, if misplaced concern.
"My volunteers sign up for giving away their bodies." Angela points out. "Mina Liao is not dead. Your permission would suffice."
A beat of silence stretches between them.
"Wait."
She does.
"Wait." Here also, is a tone she recognises. Suspicion. "Are you saying we could've been using this to treat brain injuries all this time? Why didn't you say anything?"
Well. Aside from being obvious, the dead are safe to experiment with. What worse can be done to them than that which has already been done?
"It's a prototype, Commander. There are risks involved I wasn't comfortable with."
"Which you're alright with now, but not before?"
Angela allows herself an exaggerated eye roll, safe in knowing the Commander won't see it two thousand kilometres away.
"Because, as I have already stated, Mina Liao is going to die without it."
They can certainly try for their one in a thousand chance. For a little while, at least. There isn't a point, of course. The damage her colleague has suffered is more in the realm of one in a million - which, much like the talk of miracles, is simply an obfuscation of a cruel truth. As things stand, Director Liao is, for all practical intents and purposes, dead. The only reason her status is presently in any way disputed are the wonders of modern medicine forcibly keeping her body going in absence of a working brain. If they really wanted to, they could keep the woman nominally alive for the rest of her natural lifespan, and possibly beyond with the solutions to that particular issue Angela has in the works.
This, unfortunately, does not mean the woman would have all of that time available for a possible recovery. The brain, much like any other machine, biological and otherwise, suffers from disuse. The damage Mina Liao has already endured might very well have erased a notable chunk of her from existence, and her state will only deteriorate going forward the longer her coma persists. In a few years, there might be nothing left to bring back.
Seconds pass, during which Angela pictures the Commander's agitated tread through the HQ halls. She can hear it well enough.
"We'll talk about this in person when you're back in Zurich."
It might not be a yes, but she's worked with far less.
The very same evening, her backpack full of synthetic nanite shots, Angela boards the train heading for Hamburg with Father by her side. The man is still nominally off-duty (as is she, for that matter), but upon hearing their daughter has been ordered (maybe, possibly) back to Switzerland, her parents refused to let her go alone. Too dangerous, they say. As though it would be her in any real danger in case of an attack. Still, they are adamant, and realistically, the chances of her specifically being targeted en-route to Zurich are vanishingly slim, so she doesn't fight it, opting instead to bring the shots, just in case.
In actuality, Father spends most of their sixteen-hour journey asleep, with most of his waking moments happening while switching trains. Just as well. He doesn't have nanites coursing through his veins to offset a sleepless night like she does. A fact which the soldiers carrying out a search in Fehmarn seem to appreciate, given how they let the man sleep without even asking her for his ID. Perks of fame, she supposes.
Zurich Headquarters, in contrast, feels like a fortress.
She gets her first taste of it when the taxi they arrive in is not allowed on the premises, and must instead drop them off some half kilometre away from the main entrance, where the security checkpoint has been moved and reinforced with a full detail of armed agents. One of the many such teams now posted around the base, she quickly takes note. It's a bit unsettling. A military organisation Overwatch may at its core be, but she can't recall ever seeing this many weapons on full display in the building. Evidently, their usual security measures have always been enough, seeing as the HQ itself was never attacked. But then, she's immortal. Angela imagines the show of force may be of some comfort to the regular, fragile people.
They find the Commander in the comms centre, where, according to Athena, he's spent almost the entirety of the last two days. It shows. There are dark bags beneath his eyes, and a gaunt quality to his skin borne of too much coffee, too little water, and no sleep at all. He looks old, she realises with some alarm. It's not the first time she's made the observation, but it is the first time the effect is so pronounced. The stress of the job must be catching up to him, each crisis pushing him that little farther.
"You're here early." He sounds the part, too. "Torbjorn." The men shake hands, and within that shake an entire conversation is held, she can tell, even if its contents remain a mystery to her much in the same way when her parents will sometimes speak without uttering a word.
"Commander." She loops her hands behind her back, mindful of their wandering ways. "You wanted to speak in person."
The man sighs, the weight of it shared between him and Father in yet another look she isn't fully privy to.
"I also wanted to get a second opinion before then. Which I haven't had the time for yet."
It appears it's good fortune for her and Director Liao both that she's made haste, then! Whatever opinion the man would've gotten could only serve to plant misconceptions in his mind she would later need to weed. What does the entire rest of the world know about her technology which she does not? What worth is their insight?
"Commander, you're already the best informed person on the planet right after my research team. If you have doubts, let me dispel them."
The man taps his fingers against the desk he's leaning against, then turns again to Father.
"What do you think?"
Angela resists the urge to groan. This is his second opinion? She means Father no disrespect at all, but he's just an engineer. A brilliant scientist in his own right, of course, but a robotics expert still! An entirely different field of study, one completely divorced from the workings of the human brain. The least Morrison could do is call for actual expertise.
"...I think Mina would've heard her out, at least." He locks his eyes with hers, for a moment, and Angela can't tell whether he's washing his hands of the matter or not.
"Right." Going by the small grimace on his lips, whatever the Commander wanted to hear isn't it, and Angela can't tell whether that's a good thing or not, either. "Let's move this to my office. Torbjorn, take over for me here, will you? I need a break, anyway."
Angela doesn't bristle at the implication, but it's only due to extenuating circumstances. She must allow that managing the fallout from a terrorist strike, as well as the following manhunt, are indeed an order of magnitude more effort-intensive than giving her words all the consideration they are due.
The two of them walk almost the whole distance in silence, making a short stop by the coffee machine on the way, and one more by the toilets, where Angela helps herself to a single, disgusting sip of her boss' coal-black drink while waiting for him.
When they do get to his office, Morrison essentially collapses into his chair, where he stays without movement for another short while before, at last, reaching for his coffee and motioning her to begin.
For the most part, she retreads the points she made before, expanding on them now that she's had time to think how.
In detail, there isn't a difference between what she expects her tech to do eventually, and what it's capable of at the present - that is to say, replace damaged (or missing) neuron and glial cells with new ones. However, while the chances she would under duress present her volunteers with are basically those of winning the lottery, Mina Liao might conceivably recover if administered with her treatment even as it is available right now.
"Give me the numbers," the man demands when she's done.
"Commander?"
"What are the chances of success? What are the chances of failure? If it's all so good, give me the numbers."
Ah.
Well. To start with, numbers require data from which to derive them - and not yet having a single opportunity to run a test on a human brain, data is something Angela finds herself in a critically short supply of.
Secondly, she wouldn't say Director Liao's chances are good per se. At least not in a way the Commander would agree with. Firstly, what chances can be taken as good changes on a case to case basis. For someone undergoing a run-of-the-mill surgery for appendix removal, good chances start at ninety-nine percent, with the single remaining point reserved for the devil's intervention. For her volunteers, one in a hundred, or even one in a thousand chance of her treatment working is absolutely spectacular, given the odds of them returning to life on their own. As for Mina Liao…
"What do you expect the likelihood of her waking without my intervention is, Commander?"
"Just answer my question." The man growls out.
"I will," she raises her hands in surrender. It's not like any answer she can give will be more correct or wrong than the next one. "As soon as you answer mine. Please. It's important." Important to establish a baseline of expectation. It wouldn't do to give the man an underwhelming answer, especially before correcting whatever bias he might have.
"Fine. Two, three percent?"
What? How did he come up with that? Did she not say Laio's chances are nil? If they took that number down by an order of magnitude it'd still be a stupidly optimistic… not even estimate. A conjecture at best. A ridiculously hopeful guess, but at least not one without any contact with reality whatsoever.
"Right. Assuming that's correct, which I'm obliged to say it is not, how long are you willing to wait for these two percent to materialise? You understand that the longer this takes, the worse Director Liao's odds are, yes?"
Judging by the man's expression, he is very much aware of this fact.
"I gave you mine. Now give me yours."
Her wings itch. Such as they are, their predictions hold absolutely no equivalency in any way, shape, or form, as Morrison seems to believe. She actually knows what she's talking about, whereas he threw out a random number he dreamed up in a less than lucid moment his sleep-deprived mind must've conjured up sometime in the last two days. But. She did say she would, didn't she?
"Higher than without treatment, of that much I'm certain." She pauses, considering. "Anywhere up to five percent, I'd say."
Anywhere within the margin of statistical error, really.
"Those are your good odds?"
"The best, actually." Angela stands her ground, as she knows is correct. However small or large, the possibility exists to rescue Mina Liao from her untimely demise. All this talk of percentages, numbers, and chances fails to accurately convey the gravity of possibility. As if it were a game in which one can make however many attempts they like. In her capacity as a doctor, it's her responsibility to provide her patients with treatments which best increase their chances of recovery. From one in a million to one in a thousand. From one in a thousand to one in a hundred. While all three would in all likelihood result in the same, grim ending, they aren't the same. Not to her. Not to all the people working to keep hope alive across the world.
Whether it's her words, the situation, or his exhaustion catching up with him, the man sags in his seat, seeming older still than he did not even half an hour ago.
"You're sure." It doesn't sound like a question.
"I'm not a miracle worker, Commander."
The man scoffs. A defeated sound without any real heat to it.
"Course not. The stuff you did with Shimada? I mean…" he trails off, a frown forming on his face. "What about your other nanites? The ones you're using."
The question gives Angela pause. She's never given using Uncle's nanites on others much though, it was never a viable option for a sturdy variety of reasons, chief among them the fact she dared not risk the disclosing of their existence. But the Commander already knows. Athena already knows. And while her blood can't be used to deliver the whole of mankind from death, could she indeed bring back those lucky few who would warrant a special kind of treatment?
"I'm not sure." She answers at length. "If I had a batch of them lying around with Director Liao's blueprint saved on them, then yes, they could most certainly fix her. But now?"
She has only ever given her nanites to another person once, and whatever else may have happened during the altercation which had put Genji Shimada in her care, the man was lucky indeed to have had his brain all but left unscathed. Her nanites only possess a limited capacity for healing the wounds of someone not saved in their memory bank, as demonstrated by the dual facts of her patient not simply regrowing his body out from the stump beneath his chin, and not waking up for a number of days following his beheading.
The latter especially vexed Angela like a needle stuck in her nape. A wonder of engineering that Uncle's work is, the nanite network is capable of differentiating between the change known as damage and the change brought about by bodily processes. Were it otherwise, she would ever exist in only the moment her nanites were first activated, with all the new memories she formed scrubbed clean the moment they were imprinted onto her brain. A task which, disregarding Uncle's protests, they can most certainly perform, given the state of her recall following their conversations.
Best as she can now tell, it's either a safety measure made to prevent a violent imposition upon the patient's brain in the moment of nanites' insertion into a new system, or it's just that Uncle simply never designed them to take care of a brain damaged before their introduction. And why would he? It's entirely likely he has something else already capable of doing the job gathering dust in his closet, right next to all the other devices among whom each could change the world for the better and the worse.
Could she force her nanites to try, regardless? Absolutely.
Would that be to Mina Liao's benefit? Not necessarily.
There isn't such a thing as a blank neural network. From before even one's birth, already there are patterns forming which are wholly unique to the individual whom they comprise. Some functions of the brain, such as motor control or basic life functions, are mostly the same across all humans. The way neurons connect to each other in one brain to allow one person to raise their hand doesn't much differ from how they do so in another. Making a general blueprint to fill these in shouldn't run the risk of imposition, an odd urge to scratch one's nose here or there aside.
In contrast, the way neurons interact to make for a person is literally one-of-a-kind. Billions upon billions of them, forging a pattern nobody else has ever had, or ever will have. The same event witnessed in the same place, at the same time, will be remembered in a hundred different ways across a hundred individuals. It cannot be otherwise. Not when the brain forming such memories does so on the basis of a system of connections that will never be found anywhere else. All that without accounting for the variables introduced by the individual bodies containing said brains.
In the best case scenario, the artificially constructed brain matter, made with the specific purpose of introducing as little imposition as possible, would then be appropriated by the brain and form its own connections as needed. Unfortunately, they're dealing with a one on FOUR scale, and for such an outcome a somewhat functioning brain would likely be necessary to facilitate the adoption.
By far the better outcome than that resultant of a method sure to restore Mina Liao's brain to a working condition.
The brain, but not necessarily Mina Liao.
She could, after all, manually splice her own blueprint with the Director's. Limit her own imprint as much as possible to only the damaged areas, then hope she's done everything right on the first, and likely the only try that the woman would ever get.
A shudder runs the length of her body as a number of other outcomes manifest in her mind. No. No, she'd rather do nothing than do that.
Still, there is one more way Uncle's work can be harnessed to their ends.
"We could use them for risk mitigation." She perks up, the idea gaining ground with her even as she says it. "Make a blueprint of Liao as she is now, and roll her back if something were to go wrong!"
At the present, try as she might for precision, removing her synthetic neurons from the brain would inevitably cause at least some damage to the surrounding ones. Again and again, spreading outward with each attempt. Until nothing remained of the original. Using her own blood to remove her synthetic neurons would be, if not completely risk free, then as close as it gets. It would provide a safety net, allowing her to iterate as much as proves necessary until she gets it right. This, in turn, nullifies most concerns the Commander could raise with her methods. Furthermore, it would counter the issue of any deterioration that is sure to come with the passage of time, much the same as her own strain would, actually, but with no risk involved.
It's perfect!
Without a need for caution she can move by leaps and bounds rather than incremental changes treating a patient with only one chance at recovery allows her. She could try everything. All the ideas too risky or with too little certainty of benefit to justify their use. If it works, so much the better, and if it doesn't? No harm done. Sadly, Liao's brain is not fully dead that she could use it to push her research all the way through…
…but it's enough. So much more than what she's had up until now, and only a single decision at the cusp of being made away.
"How would that work?" the Commander asks, and Angela can't help her brilliant smile.
In a matter of days - time spent on Morrison getting his second opinion - Angela is flown to Oslo with a tank full of her blood - ready and waiting for a transfusion.
Director Liao is not a pretty sight to behold. Her brain is not the only part of her to have severely suffered, merely the only part remaining an issue. The telltale scars formed in the wake of administering her PFUMN shots cover so much of the woman's body that Angela would likely not have recognised her by sight alone. Still, inferior in every way to her synthetic strain as they are, the nanites gave her colleague a lease on life, and for her purposes, that is enough.
For the time being, her orders are to do nothing more than create a blueprint for possible future use. She would be far more peeved by this if not for knowing that the miracle the Commander is holding out for has no chance of actually happening. It's only a matter of time before he, too, realises this, and greenlights her project.
It's a time she does not spend idling.
Whatever smaller parts of the whole her team has been working on are all put on hold in favour of preparing for the task ahead. There's some understandable grumbling going around the lab at the announcement, Angela herself would be none-too-pleased at being told to drop everything like that, but better they all switch tracks now and are ready to hit the ground running instead of wasting time and effort by doing the same once they have Liao's brain at their disposal.
Mindful of the value practical experience has, Angela promptly acquires test subjects of lesser quality from her usual supplier, one for each of her subordinates (Athena, for obvious reasons, excluded from that number).
"So, what is it this time?" the farmer asks upon delivering the pigs in question to the parking lot for her people to herd to the lab. It used to be that he asked no questions at all, but has since developed a streak of curiosity regarding her work following the public reveal of the Valkyria.
"Brain work. Filling up holes, reattaching bits of it back together. Things of that nature." she answers, finalising the money transfer from her private account. She's being ripped off, she knows, but such is the price one must pay for discretion, else the next thing she knows she'll need a veterinary certificate for the little holding pen she's had built for the bigger animals.
"...Right. Wouldn't uh- Not that I'm complaining, but wouldn't monkeys work better?"
"Not really." Angela catches herself before launching into a full technical explanation between a monkey and an ape. The latter's value lies primarily in the similarity of its genetic makeup to that of a human - it's the reason they were chosen for uplifting on the Moon instead of, say, dogs. Besides which, though a chimp may indeed appear impressive next to a household pet, it's an advantage comparable in scope to that of a particularly smart toddler boasting superiority over its less impressive peers. "I just need something to try on for size before we get to the real thing."
With two exceptions, her chosen method of slaughter following flooding the animals with her nanites is made to resemble the damage Director Liao has suffered as closely as possible. While a high velocity insertion of shrapnel and bone into the brains would be ideal for their purpose, doing so in a controlled environment is rather impractical. Instead, they open up the skulls and manually insert the metal they prepare with the help of a hammer. Of the two exceptions, one they have shot through the skull, and take the brain out altogether from the other to be quartered.
Over the next two months, her team is hard at work trying to bring some function back to the so damaged brains. Angela would tentatively call it a success. While they only manage to reintroduce some functionality to the four of five brains, the fifth pig, the one whose brain Angela cut into neat little cubes, manages to shuffle around in good order once glued back together.
They're not the only ones with good news to share, either.
The terrorists responsible for the Oslo attack are cornered like rats across the breadth of the Scandinavian Peninsula, with only two of them managing to make it across the Sound, a fatal mistake, given it's the ferry security cameras which allow their capture. Some make it as far as Lapland. None make it past Finland. The man in charge of this success? One Gerard Lacroix, who has apparently already had prior run-ins with these Talon criminals. They even manage to capture some of them alive, though not for the lack of trying on the terrorists' part. She's told at least one only lives thanks to her nanites neutralising the poison he ingested moments before capture.
Fanatics. Honestly. She gets half a page into their online manifesto before growing weary of the primary-schooler's heartfelt attempt at philosophy. One would think a single look around at any given place in the world would be all it takes to dismiss the notion of conflict as a driving force behind human progress. War did not invent agriculture or masonry. Neither did it provoke the existence of computing, or medicine, or maths, or any other science, or anything else good in the world. All it does is take and pervert what could be used for good in service of misery. Anyone stupid enough to die for such a thing should do the world a favour and dispose of themselves right away to spare them the effort.
They don't, unfortunately. It's up to captain Lacroix to root them out, and from what she hears, the man takes to it with fervour, if not relish. She's never met him, but the news of one cell after another being eradicated speaks well of his capability. She wonders, at one point, of the things people like him could achieve if granted the same opportunities she's been given. The opportunities she'll soon enough be able to grant to all the people of the world.
All thanks to people like her. Like Captain Lacroix. Like Athena. Like Director Liao. Like Father, Mother, and ultimately even the Commander.
In spite of all the monumental challenges heaped upon them, all adversity they must overcome, all the danger they face, things keep moving in a bright direction.
It doesn't last.