Angela is sixteen, and despite the sacrifices for her sake made by the ratkind, still made to endure being shorter than Mr. Lindholm.
Turning select functions on and off seems to be the way to go, although the hopelessly tangled nature of the code makes the task a trial of patience, and quite frankly luck. There's no rhyme or reason that Angela or either of her adoptive parents can find that would clue them into which line of code being executed will harmlessly start performing its function, and which will shred the unfortunate rodent into cellular paste. Or give it super-mega-ultra cancer. Or simply do nothing at all in the absence of fifty other connected inputs necessary for its functioning while giving no indication just what those inputs are.
Their solution, rewriting portions of the code, somehow leads to even worse results. Not for the rats, this time. For the computers. The moment Mrs. Lindholm attempts to save her editions, the laptop freezes. Well. Figuratively. In actuality it heats up, the fans kicking into overdrive like Angela never heard before, and it isn't long before the smell of burnt metal fills the workshop.
It's a good thing the adults made a point of exporting all the data they gathered onto external drives as a safety measure on a semi-regular basis. When they attach the old drive to a new computer, every single file on it, related and not, is scrambled. Losing a week of work feels bad enough. Angela thinks she would cry if they lost three years of it.
Their failure to both literally and figuratively crack the code makes for an easier choice when the time comes for Angela to send her university applications. The medical department in Stockholm is certainly world-class, but with Angela's spotless academic record, she's looking for something a step beyond. Had they been close to finally working out a way to let her grow up, she'd probably stay. Or take a gap year, at least. With no end to her troubles in sight, her family encourages her to look for the best.
The best, she eventually decides, is located in Zurich. Hosting the main Overwatch headquarters (where her adoptive father so happens to spend a not inconsiderable amount of time) has benefited the city greatly. Immense resources were poured into the rebuilding effort, making her old home into a scientific centre of Europe. She unfortunately no longer has a house there, given Uncle apparently sold the land plot in her name, but oh well.
No less important is the added benefit of having a direct flight between Stockholm and Zurich that she can take every weekend to go home. It will be a hurdle to coordinate their work between herself and Mrs. Lindholm, but certainly easier to do in person than over distances, especially with the rules they set up about not talking about certain things over electronic devices.
Not to mention how Brigitte would take the sudden and unexplainable disappearance of her big sister. Unexplainable to her little mind, that is. The two-year-old doesn't yet seem to comprehends the difference between Angela going out to get groceries and going to another country. How could she without even knowing what a country is? She'd probably think Angela died, or whatever it is that little children think happens to people when they don't show up in the morning like they have every single day of their short lives.
Their mother certainly looks harried enough in the video call the evening following her departure for Zurich. Her sister breaks out into tears as soon as she fails to grab Angela's hair through the tablet, and doesn't stop crying for the next few minutes, when Mrs. Lindholm decides to cut the call and talk again after Brigitte is asleep.
She's a little bit of a sensation on the campus due to her looks primarily, but also because of her, albeit limited, access to the Overwatch base through Mr. Lindholm. Her apparent age doesn't seem to deter the other students from inviting her along to the integrational party they throw. To the contrary. They seem fascinated to hear the story she and the Lindholms constructed to explain away her stunted growth - a hormonal disorder caused by gene treatment she underwent as an infant.
Her new peers, curiously enough, don't feel estranged like the kids in high school did. If anything, they seem fascinated by having her in their midst, and accept her engineered explanation for her stunted growth at face value to then question her about the details, and possible treatment for ageing it could mean. Conveniently for Angela, and to their great dismay, the supposed research was lost with the destruction of Zurich.
Perhaps it's their age, perhaps it's the diversity of people from all over Switzerland and beyond coming here to learn that makes the experience so different. Just in her first week she spots a squint-eyed professor, two pregnant students, someone she can't identify moving around in a wheelchair, and a dwarf (Like Mr. Lindholm!). She heard there was one autistic girl in her old school, but she was in a different class and they never so much as exchanged words. Maybe universities just attract more of a certain type of people.
The integrational party is the first she attends since… she can't even remember. Since her friends' birthdays back with Uncle, probably. The orphanage made some token efforts to create illusions of birthdays but- that mostly just meant singing happy birthday and eating a muffin, since cutting a cake into enough pieces would've made those slices no thicker than a cookie. She was never invited anywhere since being adopted, nor did she invite anyone in turn. There wasn't anyone to invite.
By and large it's curiosity that has Angela accept the invitation. She's never much cared for parties, never had the time nor inclination to spend it with people she doesn't care for, listening to music whose only commonality with her own taste lies in its volume. It's curiosity again that has her try the beer the other students have brought. It takes only a little bit convincing - she still has the body of a child - but after reminding them she's really sixteen and just wants to try, they let her have a bottle under the condition it's just the one. Sixteen she may be, but as far as they know, her body still has a child's limits. The curiosity about the taste Angela fulfils upon her first sip of the foul thing. It might not be the worst she's ever tried, but it's up there. In the name of science, she forces herself to finish the bottle over the next half hour, as to confirm a theory she's had for the longest time regarding her nanites' capacity for purging alcohol as they would any other toxin. She'd never had the courage to test said theory and try drinking herself into a stupor at home, in case she could actually become drunk.
When the first bottle fails to bring the ever-elusive buzz Angela's read about, she naturally acquires a second when no-one's looking, then sneaks off to finish it in the bathroom, to a similarly null effect. Satisfied with having tested her theory, she henceforth sticks to apple juice she's contributed for the party for the rest of the night. Mostly she just listens to others talk about things that don't really interest her, feeling somewhat stuffy in her long-sleeved clothes, packed as the dorms are with people. They're better than her peers in high school were; after all, they're here, but the topics remain the same as ever: gossip, people, movies, omnics, and politics. Especially politics.
The classes are more interesting - both compared to the other students and her time in school so far. Some of what they go over Angela already knows; science and medicine have long been her hobbies, but most of what they learn is new to her - more broad and directed all at once. Curiously enough, while other students find their free time beset on all fronts, Angela for the first time in a long while doesn't know what to do with hers. There's no Mr. and Mrs. Lindholm to help out with something, no Brigitte to keep company, no workshop to work in. Her schoolwork and required reading is expansive, yes, but it's also less exhausting now that she only deals with subjects she has an interest in, and it's mostly in German too! They have two doctors who teach in English, one French, one Bulgarian. She likes their classes best. Angela can't put her finger on it, but she gets the feeling the other professors treat her differently for some reason. She takes care to smile especially warmly in their presence.
Her first flight back home runs into an issue she and her family forgot to consider, having always either boarded airplanes together or at least see her off at the airport. She looks nine. It takes calling Mrs. Lindholm who then calls Mr. Reinhardt who is in the HQ at the time to handle the situation and convince the security to let her board the plane alone.
Brigitte's reaction when she comes back home on the first weekend reminds Angela somewhat of those videos of dogs seeing their masters returning from war circulating on the internet. Her adoptive mother is much more subdued, but also doesn't leave her side for the rest of the day. Mr. Lindholm is away somewhere in Australia, but she will meet him on Tuesday when he comes back to Zurich, so that's fine. Better than fine, even - he's supposed to show her around the Overwatch headquarters!
The questions she gets from her adoptive mother are baffling. How are the dorms? Smaller than her room at home, but that's not saying much. They're better than anything was in the orphanage. Zurich? It's still beautiful, yes. They were there not three years ago, it's bigger now, she supposes, as the rebuilding efforts continue. Oh the classes are very interesting, mostly introductory, of course, but already she finds them more challenging than anything she went over in high school. But that's fine, because they're equally more interesting as well. Yes, there really is more required reading this month alone than all of her last two years of school combined, she's checked. She'll see about making friends.
No. She's not been to the Monument to the Fallen in the Siege of Zurich yet. Yes, she's fine. Sure, they can stay hugging for a while.
She's not allowed anywhere near the kitchen or cleaning supplies for the whole weekend, Mrs. Lindholm puts her foot down on the issue. She spends most of her time playing with her sister (the girl has been inconsolable the whole week), and getting a head start on her reading. If she were allowed to help around the house, it'd be like she'd never left. Alas, the weekend passes quickly, even without as many things to do as Angela is used to, and she soon finds herself on the plane back to Zurich following her more usual airport security hurdles.
The Overwatch base, like the rest of the city, has a shine to it that comes with being new. It's a monument to humanity's resilience in the face of adversity. Mr. Lindholm told her once that it had to be repainted due to being quite literally blinding when the sunlight would fall on it at just the right angle. It must've been beautiful.
But, as the saying goes, it's the insides that matter, and nowhere before did Angela see it be so true as when her adoptive father takes her off the tourists' beaten track for a look behind the curtains. Seeing the labs for the first time feels much like stepping into a sci-fi movie. She hasn't the faintest clue as to the purpose of almost any of the machines, and she knows more than most. Apart from having to deal with the metal detectors going off as she crosses the entrance, it's all incredible. She gets to meet Mr. Reinhardt again, and even one other member of the strike force. Mrs. Amari - she's on the posters too.
She can't stay long. She hasn't the sort of clearance required, but what she does see makes what uncertainty she's still had dissipate. She will join Overwatch, the sooner the better. With all this wonderful technology there won't be a thing she can't achieve! To that end, she'd have to make her mark with something truly spectacular. Overwatch is comprised of the best among the best - and she can be that, Angela knows. But what to do so that others know it as well?
The answer is obvious. If she can gift the world what she already has, it will change the field of medical science forever.
The future of medicine indeed.
As Angela reclines in the bed of her small dormitory room that night, the latest song from Morbid Suffocation trying ever in vain to deprive her of hearing, she ponders what such a future could bring.
An end to all illness? Perhaps not all, but most of it for certain. She's not fallen sick even once since the surgery, and observed under a microscope how the nanites which make for her blood devour anything and everything that isn't supposed to be there according to their coding. Bacteria, viruses, plain dust from the air - none escape Uncle's creation. She's uncertain whether the nanites simply attack anything they come in contact with that isn't specified to be left alone, or if a specific thing has to be programmed into their code - but it's only a matter of time until she figures that out.
First aid and surgery wouldn't be revolutionised. They would be done away with altogether! It's a startling realisation - that so many things she's meant to be learning over the coming few years would become just- unnecessary. That she could render tens of thousands- hundreds of thousands of trained professionals obsolete like the self-driving cars rendered tens of millions of drivers world-wide obsolete. But so what? Billions will benefit if only she can find a way to mass produce her nanites - and it can't be that difficult, Uncle did it in his bootleg laboratory in an apartment without any sort of supporting infrastructure. She has her adoptive parents, one of whom is in Overwatch, and the state-of-the-art laboratories of Zurich to help her.
All sorts of life-threatening and permanently scarring injuries would simply cease to be. Just like Uncle once showed her, so very long ago, a fatal wound could be healed in mere seconds whereas now it spells death in minutes almost without a way to stop it. A stabbing? Trivial. Slashed arteries? Never better. Severe burns? She'd been there. Disfigurement would likewise never again be an issue. Physical therapy wouldn't ever be needed when the nanites could rebuild tissue in perfect shape. More than that. Cancer could be dealt with at cellular level within seconds of coming into existence without anyone being the wiser. Neural decay? What decay? Her own nanites have kept her biologically nine years old for seven years now, and could potentially do so indefinitely at any stage of anyone's life. Maybe even reverse the process with some manual work.
She could bring an end to death.
Angela clutches at her chest - still too small to fit what Uncle had put there and aching with each excited beat.
If she does this, what would she even need Overwatch for? What more could she create that the world would behold in awe after creating a panacea? What would there even be to do after elevating mankind to such heights? To what the ancients would have called godhood?
The thought leaves her stunned. Two thousand years ago, she would have been called a goddess. Forever young. Unchanging.
She doesn't get any sleep that night, her aching heart too loud for her ears to ignore.