It's a year until she can sign up for a second major, but considering who it is that adopted her, Angela doesn't spend that time idling. She quickly establishes a new rhythm of studying medicine four days of the week that she has her classes on (complete with required and additional reading, of course) then using the other three - weekends, and Thursdays - absorbing what she can from the Lindholms at home, and self-teaching in Zurich respectively. Her adoptive parents worry when she first shares her plan with them - saying that taking on two such demanding majors might be overreaching.

"It's alright. I can always just sleep a little less and study a little more."

"Angela, how do you intend to study when you're dead on your feet the whole day? I pulled many an all-nighter in my day, but that always comes at a cost." Mr. Lindholm states the obvious.

"Oh, uh…" Right. That. "I never told you, did I?"

"Told us what?" her adoptive mother pipes up, sharing a look to whose meaning Angela isn't privy to with her husband.

"I can function just fine on two hours of sleep a day. Probably less, but two hours for sure. I never checked how far I can regularly take this. Things get a bit… fuzzy." She pauses in her explanation to try and recall the experience. Not an easy thing to do when the core of it has to do with missing entire sections of her recall. "Anyway, the point is I don't need as much sleep as normal people."

A heavy sigh blows past the shorter adult's lips. "And you've known this for how long?"

"About three years."

"You've been sleeping for two hours for three years?"

"What? No. F-w-way more." Angela catches herself at the last moment. Four hours is indeed a way more, two hundred percent of what she figures is actually more than enough - but then she just said two, and the man sounds less than impressed. Which is silly. Not only should two be enough, she gets four!

At least her argument about having enough time to study stands up to scrutiny with this additional knowledge divulged to her adoptive parents. With a concrete goal ahead of her, she needs to be both a doctor of medical and engineering sciences to reconstruct Uncle's work. And yes, she could get one doctorate first, then the other, but while she has all the time in the world, everyone else in it doesn't. For each year she dallies, millions will die that her technology could save.

Funnily enough, when the time comes and she starts attending both courses come the new academic year, the additional workload brings with it the comfort of having her days filled without hours left to occupy. It's familiar. Fun. Difficult also, but nothing she can't handle. Even her adoptive parents must admit so once the first semester comes to pass and Angela has nothing but exemplary grades to show upon returning home for the Christmas break. Her nanites keep her body in as good a condition as she can be. The only fatigue she ever feels is of the regular, bored sort to which she is unfortunately not immune. Music helps a lot. It drowns out her thoughts when they become too loud with equations. Lets her sleep when the chapter she's just memorised won't stop repeating in her ears with her eyes closed.

The holidays help. It's liberating to wear shorts and short sleeves the whole day. She can take her assignments at her own pace without rushing, and spend the rest of the time with her family: Helping their mother with decorating the house and regaling her with university minutiae. Humouring her adoptive father's stories with her own commentary. Trying to find a documentary with enough animals in it her three-year-old sister won't get immediately bored watching with her. Helping Brigitte make snowmen (make them for her, really). And above all, answering the girl's unending deluge of her newly favourite word - why. She still has enough time to bother the adults about letting her back into the workshop on her own - she's almost eighteen, went through actual OHS training, and is basically harm-retardant. There's no reason not to let her in.

"Or you could find a new hobby."

A new hobby? Why? She's not bored, she just wants to do something useful with her time. The usual pastimes of her peers leave her bothered. Wanting. Tinkering is a good hobby. Reading scientifics journals is a good hobby. Watching nature documentaries is… maybe less of a good hobby, but she likes knowing things. She likes things that stay with her, that she can learn from, that she can use. Anything else feels too much like a waste of time she could spend better to enjoy. The psychology majors would probably tell her it's important she finds a hobby wholly unconnected to her work, but psychology majors are too lazy to pick a real, scientific field of medicine to study, so how could they ever comprehend that learning is what she enjoys doing most? Learning has a purpose. Research has a purpose. What purpose does going to a cinema serve when she can watch movies at home? What's the purpose of watching movies at home when she could be putting together her own version of Uncle's nanites?

After all, it seems the task of it will be even more difficult than she had envisioned.

Decoding the programs running within her blood is still as arduous as ever. More so, even, without having access to the machines at home for five days a week. Still, figuring all the code out is a matter of time - counted in years, true, but an eventuality all the same. Doing something with them is the problem.

A problem, Angela realises, she can sidestep entirely.

If she can't use specific strands of Uncle's spaghetti code in her own blood, she'll just make her own nanites and create neat and tidy connections as needed! Rudimentary they will be, but aren't all prototypes? The essentials: replication, movement, clean-up - basic stuff, is all there. Everything else can come later.

It doesn't turn out quite as easy as Angela expected it to be.

Her very first own singular nanite isn't really a nanite. Having made it as small as she's able, she can still see circuitry under just a hundred levels of magnification. This is fine, it's just a model for the real thing - her adoptive father's tools don't lend themselves to building on such a small scale. With proper equipment, she's sure to make it small enough to comfortably circulate through the body. Mr. Lindholm promises to try and have the Overwatch laboratory in Zurich let her use their machines, and just two weeks later she finds herself watching her first actual nanites be made there.

By a machine the size of a wardrobe.

And it still makes them too big.

The prototype can circulate easily enough in the circulatory system. But what courses through her own veins is small enough to seep through the pores in her veins and reach every cell in her body as needed. They make two hundred anyway, and it takes them almost an hour to do so. Angela's best estimate is that a cubic millimetre of her blood contains some two million nanites. Said nanites, when in a vial back home, start showing signs of wear after around one hundred eighty days spent outside her body. Assuming such is their limit, the device attached to her heart must produce enough nanites in that time to fully replace the failing ones, and she knows from its coding that it's capable of more intense quotas. Assuming it were capable of producing properly sized nanites, in order to saturate a cubic millimetre of her blood with them, the wardrobe at Overwatch would have to be running for four hundred and seventeen days.

There's a million cubic millimetres in a litre, and around four litres of nano-blood in her body.

Angela grudgingly admits she might have underestimated the severity of the task at hand.

"It's just the first try, don't worry. You'll get it eventually." Angela smiles at her adoptive father's reassurance, feeling like throwing her vial of paltry two hundred in a streetside trash bin.

She doesn't, of course. That would mean having to spend another hour waiting for another batch, and little use as they have - she can still use them for testing. To that end, Angela misappropriates a mouse from the university medical labs, and after setting up the programming, injects the proto-nanites straight into the rodent's heart.

That something's not right becomes apparent before she even pulls the needle out. The moment Angela puts the mouse back into the plexiglass cage in her dorm room, it takes off in a frustratingly familiar blind panic, hitting the walls of its container whilst frantically running in a circle, letting out distressed sounds all the while.

Just a few minutes later, it falls over twitching. Angela supposes she could call it progress under a certain mindframe, in that the animal is only bleeding from all its orifices instead of turning into bloody paste.

Upon dissection, she finds the circulatory system shredded. It appears her two hundred have torn the animal's veins from the inside. Just two hundred.

She needs trillions. Between eight and ten, to be exact. How vexing.

She doesn't need to wonder what would've happened if her injection was that of two million. She'd seen the results of that already. Granted, her nanites being too large to properly saturate the body, the mouse would likely still be recognisably a mouse.

There are a plethora of issues that could've caused such damage. The nanites might be too large, their edges too sharp, their coding still faulty. That last possibility she confirms not to be the case first, the tasks she set her creation to were too simple to fail so spectacularly. The matter of size is a priority regardless, and therefore not worth investigating. Could it be a simple mechanical imperfection of near-microscopic sharp edges turning the swarm of her nanites into a blender? Would smaller size mitigate the issue or would the truly microscopic nanites turn the entire body into a finely cut-up mush? At the scale she's working with, filing the edges would be catastrophic for the structural integrity - she's already trimmed the hardware toolset down to absolute basics, and the microchip alone, around which the nanites are built, remains bigger than Uncle's whole creation.

How did he do it?

This question is all she can think of when yet another model proves to be yet another failure. Thanks to her adoptive father's ingenuity and resources at his disposal, they manage to reduce the size even further, making her nanites only about four times as big as Uncle's, and still too large to freely roam between the cells of a body. They achieve this at the cost of further bogging down the production speed. This, the man explains, is the hard limit of the materials they work with, as anything smaller will melt under the strain of just about any computing processes. Every new iteration sees another mouse perish in the name of science. The only real progress all this amounts to is Angela's latest test subject taking twice as long to die as they did in the beginning. She's fairly sure filing off a single layer of particles would cause her nanites to malfunction at this point. Not that there is much of a difference between them theoretically working as intended and malfunctioning. Both bring about the same result.

How the hell did Uncle do it? She has her adoptive father - an engineering genius, his wife - a competent engineer and programmer in her own right, and even access to some of Overwatch resources whereas he had an equivalent of a shed if comparisons were to be made between their labs.

She hasn't even started working on the fabricator when the weekend before her eighteenth birthday comes around. Four years to go then a doctorate, she thinks as she blows the candles on her cake out, surrounded by her cheering family. It's a private affair, a week early for convenience sake so as to not throw all their schedules into disarray by having to fly and arrange something in Zurich. Mr. Lindholm jokes they will have to organise another coming-of-age when her body catches up so that they can properly celebrate. Angela wisely refrains from informing the man the joke's on him, seeing as she could well drink water to the same effect.

"I don't understand it." She complains to her sister when they share a bath later that same day. As much as she's allowed to complain, anyway. "I'm working off a blueprint, but even when I try copying everything exactly, it still comes out wrong. Too big. Takes too long to manufacture. Do you know how big the machine we use to make them is?"

Naturally, Brigitte doesn't.

"Very big. Like four bathtubs stacked atop each other. And it makes just hundreds. Hundreds! I need millions a day at least. Wait, do you know how much a million is?"

Naturally, Brigitte doesn't.

"It's a lot. Imagine a hundred, but times hundred. And then that times hundred."

"What's times?"

Angela opens her mouth to teach the girl this fundamental of maths, only to find her mind void of a ready and waiting explanation.

"It's uh… it's how many times you multi- how many times you add something with… the same amount of something? A-anyway a million is like the water in this bathtub, and a one is like a drop. You can't wash yourself in a drop of water, right? You need to fill a bathtub with a million drops first." Angela nods in satisfaction at finally finding some form of comprehension on her sister's face. "It's the same with what I'm working on. I'm doing something wrong, and I don't have the first idea what that could even be."

"Don't worry 'Gela. You're super smart, you can get it to work for sure!"

Yes. Yes, she is. And she must. Uncle might have created this impossible technology, but it is her who will bring it to the fore. Her gift for humanity - life eternal and free of disease. She will be the one remembered for all the generations to come for changing the very fabric of human life, not her criminal of an Uncle. Not the man who somehow created the most advanced piece of medical equipment in history just to put it inside her and let the world rot.

The actual day of her eighteenth birthday peacefully passes her by in the Zurich university lab, still without a breakthrough. With no solution in sight, Angela decides to once again sweep the drawing board. Wasting time on doing the same thing again and again reeks too much of hopelessness. No. She needs another avenue of production altogether.

The problem she faces is that she's already exhausted the most advanced means of production available to her. Whether anything better exists in the world or not is irrelevant seeing as this is what she has access to. And in any case, she knows for a fact it should be more than enough. Uncle never had a hundredth of the resources at her disposal.

Well… that's not quite right. She has access to an unequalled piece of production technology. And it just so happens it's custom-made for cellular level work.

It also happens to be the most severely arcane case of spaghetti code Angela has ever heard of. Not to mention the anti-tampering measures of which even a trace has yet to be found in the coding. Every attempt at rewriting it so far has spelled doom for the device used for the task.

Anticipating what's to come, Angela acquires a number of old devices. Whether they be phones, laptops, tablets or rigs matters little. All they need to do is be capable of editing text, and to that end she could use any machine going forty years back so long as she can get it to run. Which she can. She's an aspiring engineer!

She approaches the issue from multiple directions. Trying to edit with the nanites live scrambles the machines immediately. Doing so when they're turned off only works until the changes are saved - likely a safety measure, running the code against its database before accepting an execution. Same effect when she attempts to substitute the files themselves with brand new ones. Or with copies - though curiously enough, exact file copies go through just fine, lending credence to her theory about a comparison check. Any attempt to delete the files themselves causes much the same issues as tampering with their contents.

It's very comprehensive, Angela must admit. It's at once immensely disappointing and reassuring. She never thought about it before, but if a hacker got inside the network that is her blood, she could be killed as if she were an omnic. She can't be too cross with Uncle for making sure that won't happen.

Her next idea is to port the old coding into her own creations. This at first proves a fruitless venture as the proto-nanites fail to do anything at all upon activation. It does, however, give her an idea. What if she were to tamper with the original coding on her own machines? Perhaps whatever they lack to use the foreign code will also fail to accommodate the defensive measures.

It's a long minute following Angela saving the changes. A minute during which her chest grows more and more pained as more and more adrenaline floods her system with every second the phone in her hands doesn't start overheating. It's a struggle to breathe by the time she's certain her shot in the dark has been proven correct.

With this, most of the struggles she foresaw in her quest to reshape humanity will be made non-issues. Aside from developing the technology, distribution was always going to be the greatest limiting factor in how many people would receive Angela's gift of eternal life. There are countries in the world where people could pay for all their daily expenses with the money Angela spends on her lunch. Having all of them, and then their children, and their childrens' children be implanted with their personal fabricators would've been a nightmare. With this, all it'll take to end death will be a single injection. No. No, it goes beyond even that. With that sort of tech, unborn children would already have nanites coursing through their bloodstream right in their mothers' wombs. With some additional work, her tech could do away with birth defects rather than fix them after the fact, maybe even speed-up pregnancies. God knows Angela's heard enough complaints about back pains to last her a lifetime in the months leading up to Brigitte's birth.

If anyone were to ask, she would be unashamed to admit sleep eludes her in the week following her discovery - a week of which every available moment she spends sequestered away in her dorm, writing the sequence to have the nanites make more of themselves rather than cells. She even calls off her weekly visit home, citing an academic emergency, as to finish what she's started rather than agonise over being away from her work just moments before a breakthrough. There is too much work to be done. First, the coding. Then, designing a nanite whose sole function is to make the actual working version of itself at a smaller scale, and finally having it manufactured with Mrs. Reinhardt's help at Overwatch headquarters.

When the work is finally done, Angela pours an ounce of pig blood she got at a butcher's into the vial, and observes how the contents light up red. Dim at first, then more and more brilliant until it dims again, presenting her with a vial of fluorescent red goo.

Excited to finally have something to show for all her hard work, Angela wastes no time in loading up the syringe and giving her latest lab mouse a shot.

Immediately the rodent goes mad, and quicker than ever before, forcing her to drop it inside the plexiglass cage rather than put it back down. It might well have saved her life.

The mouse starts falling apart almost as soon as it touches the ground, melting like chocolate right before her eyes. Angela doesn't think to count in the moment, but she'll later figure it couldn't have taken more than half a minute for the transformation to finish, leaving nothing but a mass of faintly glowing sludge at the bottom of the cage.

She doesn't dare breathe as she slowly backs away from the grey goo so as to not disturb the air. Only once she locks the door behind her does she finally let out a choked gasp, and clutches at her hurting chest.

She needs to tell someone. Get help.

No. No she can't, she'll be expelled for sure. Hah! Expelled. If only. What would she even be tried for? Research into self-replicating AI? Terrorism? Reckless endangerment of the human species? Her life would be over before it ever started, and then who would continue her work, and how? No. She needs to deal with this on her own.

It takes… a considerable time to get her breathing back under control, and longer still for her heart to stop hurting. The shakes don't let go the whole rest of the evening as she repurposes another plexiglass cage to put as a roof on top her own cage, then seals it with copious amounts of duct tape to finally wheel it off to the incinerator an entire campus over on a janitor's cart - acquired along with they keys on a pretext of having made something exceptionally smelly in her experiments.

She spends the night out in the park, really wishing she could get blackout drunk and either wake up to the world still standing, or never wake up at all. When the morning breaks and she finds people on the campus going about their business without falling apart, her body all but shuts down with relief.

It's only a few seconds, more of a fainting spell than anything, but it's still remarkable even that much could happen with her body being what it is.

Angela tables the self-replication idea for the time being, possibly forever, and resolves to never mention her experiment to anyone ever. She's not very keen on messing with something with the demonstrated capacity to turn her into sludge.

This leaves her in what amounts to the starting position of not having any way to create nanites of acceptable size and quality. It's enough to make her seriously consider the pros and cons of taking her fabricator out of her chest for study. Angela has a feeling she would never be able to put it back together after disassembly, or to even make a functional copy, certainly not of the same size.

Stuck, and out of ideas, Angela resorts to desperate measures.

She resorts to finding the man with whom it all started.