"Dad?"
Her adoptive father starts upon hearing the word, choking on his drink a bit. He must feel as awkward hearing it as Angela feels saying it going by the wide-eyed look he's giving her. Still. It feels no less strange than calling him that than Mr. Lindholm out-loud, nowadays.
"Yes?" he replies at length after cleaning his throat.
"Do you know what happened to my uncle?"
The man puts his glass away entirely, his brows furrowed in concentration as he scans the skyline of Zurich.
"If I recall, Interpol lost his trace somewhere in Istanbul, but that was years ago. Why?"
"I've just been wondering lately about what happened to him after Jugendamt took me away. I suppose I was curious why he… did what he did, and then just…" Forgot about it. About her. Like it wasn't important. Like it wouldn't change the world. Like it didn't matter. Like he had more important things to do.
Angela feels small even considering the possibility. She can't even imagine anything so grand that she'd leave the nanites behind without a second thought to pursue it.
When Angela announces her wish to go on a holiday to Turkey following the end of her third year of university, her adoptive parents appear understandably surprised. She's never expressed any interest in either travelling, or even just vacation, always spending all her time between her research and the three Lindholms. Their reactions are… mixed, and Angela belatedly remembers her professed destination is also where her adoptive father lost his original arm. Her mother looks overjoyed for a space of a brief seconds before shooting an uncertain look her husband's way, who for his part is mostly just curious about her choice.
"I thought Brigitte would like a change of pace. We always just go skiing." She's had her excuse ready for weeks. Besides, her sister should indeed like it. With all their schedules being what they are, they never go too far away from home, or for too long. Brigitte treats Zurich like some faraway land. It'd do her good to see it's not the edge of the world. Their parents seem to agree.
Angela comes to the unpleasant realisation the same might apply to herself when disembarks the airplane. Her lungs are assaulted with an oppressive wave of heat so unlike anything she's gotten used to in the Swiss highlands or the northern winds of Sweden. It might've been wiser to come here during the winter holidays, but what's done is done and Angela can't afford to wait for so long regardless. Three years of research, half her time in the university, and with nothing to show for it but one failure after another. She aims to join Overwatch in another three years, and unless she devises something monumental to garner enough attention, that is simply not going to happen. Especially with her diminutive stature.
Istanbul is… nice, Angela supposes. Beautiful even. But nothing from the majesty of Hagia Sophia to the charm of little street stalls captures her attention the same way the canvas of a body does. She hides her lukewarm interest well, not wishing to bring down her family's mood. Her adoptive father takes them to see the streets he fought in on the day he lost his arm, recounting the events with a far-away expression, and his wife's hand on his shoulder. Angela remains silent throughout, as ever when without things to say. Her sister fills that void with all the fervour only a five-year-old can maintain.
None of it is what Angela came here for. Uncle's last trace ended in the underbelly of the Turkish metropolis, and this is where she intends to pick up his scent. She'd spent years with that man, if anyone can pinpoint where he'd been hiding, it's her. If anyone knows his peculiarities and tells, it's her. She's done her research prior and found a few areas just like what she remembers from her childhood. A little run-down, but not poor. Out of the way, but not hidden. No crime around to draw the authorities attention, or so the records of her old neighbourhood say. Equipped with her phone's translator, Angela sets out on her quest.
She only has a few hours a night, what with evading her family, but she makes good progress in finding the people who were around there at the right time. Store owners and the elderly mostly. When they ask her why she's looking for the man, she tells them the truth; she's looking for her uncle with whom she's lost contact. It's enough to convince most, and vague enough they tell themselves the rest of the story. Poor girl, they must think, looking for a needle in the burning haystack that was Istanbul under the omnic attack. Truthfully, the hardest part is evading the police that one concerned lady calls on the lone nine-year-old wandering around at night.
A haystack the city may be, but it's not a needle she's looking for. A half-free clinic treating anything and everything is far more distinct than Uncle's visage. And eventually she finds her trace.
"Ah, yes there was a doctor here working pro-bono, such a nice man, I could hardly breathe after walking ten steps before I went to him, now look at me! Missing, you say? What a pity."
Angela deigns not to mention the old man had brushed his hand against Death's own knuckles the day he went to Uncle for treatment. Few had died in his care, but Angela recognises a terminal case of lung cancer when she hears of it, and Uncle's experiential remedies were the most dangerous of all.
The phone numbers that she manages to get, two, in fact, are both long dead. The most useful information she gets is finding the apartment Uncle set up his clinic in. Or rather, finding the landlord.
"You don't look alike." Is the first thing the man says once she explains the purpose of her visit at his door.
"He's my uncle, not my father."
"Hmpf. And where are your parents? Girls like you shouldn't walk around alone at night."
She's an adult, thank you very much. Not that she bothers to try and explain it.
"Dead."
The man makes a face, but tells her what he claims to remember. How some German called him about renting an apartment years back. Yeah, he was a doctor. Weird set-up, but what does he know? Up and left one day without a word. Always paid on time, though.
"Do you still have the phone you were called on, then? Could I see it?"
"It's been years, I delete my calls history every-"
"I'll trade you mine."
When Angela returns to the hotel that night, she's missing a thousand euro worth of her phone, but aside from thinking up an excuse for her parents regarding this, it's of no concern. The phone numbers she'd gotten prior were both connected to Uncle's public persona. She can't be sure if the one he used before he came to Istanbul would've been different, but it's worth a shot.
The rest of their vacation is uneventful. To Angela, anyway. They see all the must-sees and even some less known areas as recommended by some of her adoptive father's acquaintances. At least her family is having a good time, so she makes an effort to partake in the activities. It's not like she can do much else without her computer on hand.
By the end of their getaway, Angela is the only one of the four who doesn't resemble a lobster in colour. She never thought about it, but it makes sense. Sunburn is just another word for inflammation, like so many things are. With her nanites working on keeping her cells intact, or replacing the ones damaged by the radiation, she can easily spend forever in the sunlight without any filter or consequences. Or tan, given she has no need for additional melanin.
Breaking open the memory storage of her new, old phone is a breeze. Devices nowadays never really lose data with how much storage space they're packing. A deleted video can be recovered years later if the device was not filled to the brim with other things in the meantime, much less the short string of numbers weighing a few kilobytes that comprise what she's seeking.
Angela segregates the calls data by date, dismissing most of it out of hand. She has a timeframe of a few months, since nobody remembered when Uncle came other than that it was in summer. Which leaves her with… a few hundred unique phone numbers. That is fine. Isolating the code of her nanites is also tedious. This is nothing new.
Most - almost all the receivers greet her in Turkish. She's prepared a few words for them to explain she was trying to call her uncle Ludwig, and she's sorry for interrupting their evening. She wouldn't have bothered even with that much, but there is a non-zero chance that if this works, Uncle might speak up in a language different than German.
Two nights in, and on the verge of deciding to go sleep for the night, Angela stumbles across an irregularity in the form of a string of strongly accented vulgarities flung her way regarding the late hour. In English.
She thinks it's English, anyway. She can't tell half the words apart.
"Angela Ziegler speaking. Is it-"
"Ziegler? What the hell's it now ye- Wait no yer not! Who's this?"
"Angela Ziegler." She stresses her name with a wince. Her heart is hurting again with every rapid beat, like it hasn't since her first and only attempt at nanite self-replication. "I'm looking for my uncle."
Seconds pass, with the only sound in Angela's ears being her own rushing blood. Then the line goes dead. She tries calling again, twice, but both times the number is unavailable.
It may not have been Uncle, but there's definitely a connection. He knew their surname for one. Knew someone named Ziegler for two, and cut the line the moment he realised it wasn't the one he knew that called him. This is all good to know, and certainly something to go off of, but Angela is a scientist, not a detective or a spy. Can she track the location of a phone number?
A quick internet search tells her she can. And easily. Huh.
Her attempts, however, yield no result. Not because the method doesn't work. It does. The website tracks her own device perfectly back outside to the garden where she places it to make sure the program isn't actually just tracking her computer. It even finds her orphanage when she types in the old matron's number. She supposes it takes less time to take out and destroy a SIM card, or destroy a phone, or whatever the man did, than it takes to learn she can track a number and then do it.
...Now what? Asking her adoptive parents for help would clue them in to the fact she's caught a thread of Uncle's coat, and she is under no illusion they wouldn't immediately forward it to the authorities. Now, Angela would certainly enjoy seeing Uncle be imprisoned for the things he's done. He's certainly deserving of a long prison stay. However, that doesn't help her, and by extension, humanity, any. She needs a breakthrough, and she needs it as soon as possible. The economy of scale is cruel - with every day she fails to build her nanites, a hundred thousand die on a day just like this, decades from now. Whatever harm Uncle is capable of, he'll never come anywhere close to that.
In addition, telling would also mean she'd have to admit to sneaking out at night during their stay in Istanbul, and worse yet, to having altogether different intentions for going to Turkey than those she'd presented her parents with. No. No that won't do at all.
Angela stares at her old phone in the silence of the night, feeling more drained than she knows is possible. It was a long shot, anyway. An idea born of a desire to skip the hard part rather than work through it like an adult. A waste of time. She can work it out on her own. She will. She has to.
Her resolve lasts all of a week.
She's on a walk with Brigitte when the call happens. With Angela available for most of the summer, the Lindholms decide to have her take care of her sister instead of sending the girl to the daycare. Privately, Angela thinks Brigitte's a bit old for needing a minder - she was around her age when her parents were killed and she did fine. That is not to say she objects to the idea, the opposite in fact. It's just that their parents' worries have no ground in reality. It's vanishingly unlikely Brigitte would somehow kill herself if left alone in the house. Uncle left her to her own devices more often than not, and here she still is.
It's amazing to see how her sister can just walk up to a group of other kids on the playground and insert herself into it just like that. Did she do it also when she was her age? Angela can't remember.
She is broken out of her musings when her phone rings to a tune of some Turkish song she never bothered changing. It's a good ringtone, loud and jarring. She can't miss it if she wanted to.
"Angela Ziegler speaking." She answers the unknown number.
"Hello, dear. I hear you've been looking for me."
Angela's spine goes ramrod straight at the German spilling from the speaker.
"Who is it?" She has to make sure. The voice is… similar to what she remembers. She could never forget it, but the signal stretches and distorts.
"Why, I'd have thought you'd remember your uncle's voice. I've been told you managed to call an acquaintance of mine. Now, while I wouldn't mind a reunion, I don't think that's the reason you've been looking for me?"
Skip to the chase Angela does, to the endless amusement of her estranged caretaker.
"That old thing? I'm flattered that you're following in my footsteps but I'd have thought you more ambitious than that."
Angela bristles, a swarm of scathing thoughts swirling in her mind of which she says none. Following his footsteps - as if! She aims to change the world. What has he done with the amazing technology he's created? Nothing! And he calls her ambition lacking?
"Just a stepping stone."