Angela procures a height chart to hang up on the wall of her dorm first thing upon returning to Zurich and does not fail to use it every day for the entire next month and change. Making the marks herself, however, proves to be an exercise in frustration as every reading comes in different to the last - not in a linear fashion, either. Angela remains unsure whether she has really gained half the centimetre that her markings on the chart say she has gained. After all, she can reasonably assume the centimetre she's lost according to some of the lines is simply human error.
She throws the chart out to stop the pointless exercise, and resolves instead to use the one she'd received soon after her adoption, the one which now decorates Brigitte's room. She just needs to clue her adoptive family in as to the method she's found to overcome the anti-tampering, first.
It's a good thing the human mind is so atrocious at picking up on incremental changes such as those happening in a growing body. It takes Angela a number of visits in Italy to construct a plausible scenario for her discovery of the cyberwarfare properties of strawberry milk.
"Mom?" She times her revelation just before the Saturday evening soap opera to save them both from the mindless drivel. "I've got something to tell you."
The woman starts in her seat, her eyes entirely more alarmed than Angela's words warrant.
"What is it? Is everything alright?"
"Um… I found a way to disable the anti-virus in my blood?" She decides to cut to the chase, her adoptive mother's sudden anxiety rubbing off on her in spite of knowing better.
"That's-" It's a curious thing to watch half a dozen expressions flicker across her face in so short a span of time she can only recognise the one it finally settles on - unabashed joy. "That's wonderful news! W-what happened? How did you do it?"
Angela makes sure to present the process behind her supposed findings as the most boring thing possible - the very same thing they've been doing for years. The only difference being she's had the good luck to stumble across the right string of code, from which she unravelled the twine.
"Eventually, I arrived at the chemical components required for lifting the countermeasures, and, well… they're a match for strawberry milk." She looks to the side as she finishes the explanation, her cheeks heating up in second-hand embarrassment. Although it really is a brilliant solution to the problem of cybersecurity, she feels no less ridiculous saying the words out loud.
Seconds pass in silence. Enough of them for Angela to school her features and look back to her company, whose empty eyes are stuck at some invisible point in the air. Not too dissimilar a reaction from her own when told about the pickle juice.
"Why strawberry milk?" the woman asks at length.
Why indeed? Regular two percent UHT milk would be the superior choice in terms of availability, and about the same in terms of probability of an unplanned injection. There's an amount of plasticity to the method, her testing has found. The milk loses its capacity for disabling the anti-tampering upon crossing the ten percent water content increase. Curiously, adding an additional half the mass in sugar does nothing to impede it at all.
"Obviously." Uncle had told her with an incredulous look when questioned on the matter. "If you add sugar to strawberry milk, it's just sweeter strawberry milk! But! If you keep adding water then it stops being milk, yes?"
But that's not what her mother is asking about, and she's not going to defend Uncle's admittedly sound logic right now.
"Anyway, I already made some changes to my code, and-"
"You shot yourself up with strawberry milk without-" Mrs. Lindholm looks to almost physically hold wrench herself back - biting her lip with eyes closed. She sighs. "Why didn't you tell us before? We could've taken precautions."
"What precautions?" She crosses her arms. "What were we going to do, prepare a transfusion? My nanites would just eat it all. Same with every other medicine in the world, you know that."
"I- I do, just-" The woman deflates, taking Angela's hands in her own. "I just worry sometimes. What if we do something wrong and won't know how to fix it?"
Given her experience with Uncle's tech, that would probably cease to be Angela's problem very quickly.
"I am being careful. I prepared a factory reset if anything felt off." She thinks up on the spot. "I didn't want to make a fuss over nothing if I turned out to be wrong. It's been almost two months and I'm fine."
"Just… tell us these things. Please."
Something inside Angela rebels at the notion. She knows what she's doing better than anyone else alive besides Uncle and his benefactor. Both the Lindholms have helped a lot, but already they know but a fraction of what Angela has been learning recently and the gap will only widen in time.
Still.
"Okay. I promise."
If the day comes that she has to break her vow, it's not like it'll be any worse than her failing to mention her meetings with Uncle.
Matters of pressing importance taken care of, Angela pushes away the thought of having a similar talk with her second parent, and employs the one present in marking her height. Though they have to wait until the following morning for that, what with Brigitte already asleep in her room where the chart resides, and spend the rest of the evening discussing how her ageing bypass works.
Come morning, a new red line joins the one made seven years prior, proudly standing a centimetre above one hundred twenty five it's stood at for all this time for all the world to see.
Well. For Brigitte and their father to see when he receives the photo sent by his wife. She should've waited until the whole family was together before springing the news on them.
As for Angela's research, there is no breakthrough. Not in the way she had hoped for, anyway. Filling the gaps of which Uncle's tech comprises is an arduous process with every discovery pushing Angela closer to her goal an inch at a time instead of the leaps and bounds she's hoped for. That is not the issue. Though her progress is slow it is progress, and after years of stalled effort, every little glimpse behind the curtain gives Angela the jitters. Flashes of brilliance are all well and good, but those can only be lit after the steady effort of building a bonfire; she understands. The issue, as ever, come with the implementation.
Her first functioning fabricator comes into being over the Christmas break when she can devote all her time (of which much is needed) to building it. It's the size of a nightstand, but so are dialysis machines and their size doesn't hinder their usefulness overmuch. Quite an improvement over the two by one metre monolith inside Overwatch HQ, and infinitely more productive with an output of one sixth that of Uncle's fabricator. The nanites themselves are still larger by half and with only the rudimentary functions, but they're good enough, finally able to squeeze in between cells like the original do. Overall, it's nowhere near up to par with the piece in her chest, but then it needn't be - it's a prototype.
She grabs one of the mice she bought at a pet shop specifically for this occasion, and injects it with a dose of her nanites. The alarmed peep it gives off sends a jolt of anxiety down Angela's throat, but when it settles down a minute later, she can only assume it must've been the needle itself.
"Whatcha doing 'Gela?"
She turns in her seat to see Brigitte standing in the half-open door. Their parents have finally lifted Angela's ban on entry to the workshop, and even allowed their youngest to join her, provided they won't be using any of the more dangerous machines together.
"Running an experiment, wanna see?" She pats her thigh for the girl to sit on, and it's all the encouragement Brigitte needs.
"What experiment?" her sister asks, wriggling into place.
"With those tiny little healing machines I've been building. Look!I injected this one two minutes ago and it's still alive!"
Brigitte cranes her face upwards, brows creased.
"Alive?"
Oh. Uh…
"They're- sick and I'm trying to help them. If my medicine doesn't work, they uh- they don't usually make it." She cobbles together an explanation.
The girl makes an O face, before her expression suddenly crumbles, tears pooling in her eyes.
"You have to help them!"
...Right. Well. She supposes she can put off the real test for a few hours.
She returns to her experiment in the evening with her mother in tow, after Brigitte is put to sleep, and unceremoniously grabs the mouse in a vice-like grip to cut the writhing creature's belly open with a scalpel.
"Shouldn't you at least put it to sleep, first?" the woman asks with a wince over the maddened squeaking.
"I…" ...didn't think about it? "I'm not sure what would do the job. These are supposed to neutralise drugs-" at some point "-so if everything is working, there's no point."
"Right." She sighs. "Just don't let Brigitte see this."
They both observe as the mouse's belly begins to glow a faint red, and slowly, anemically, start the process of healing. Three minutes it takes her nanites to complete the process, and the result is far from what she'd expected.
There's a scar, and an ugly one at that, more like one left by a heated iron than a thin and sharp scalpel. It's ugly, thick, and soft. Nothing like the perfectly unblemished and firm skin she'd get if she cut open her own stomach.
"It worked." Her mother exclaims in wonder, pulling Angela out of her reverie and into a hug.
Wordlessly, Angela extracts herself from the embrace to poke at the scar. There's a fingerprint left on the melted-like skin when she pulls her hand back.
"I don't think that it did," she argues with a scowl.
"Oh, Angela. One step at a time, right? This is already huge! You'll get it eventually."
Of course she will. That is not the point. What her mother doesn't know is that with the amount of data she and Uncle have gathered she should already be able to do much, much more than this. Her blueprints are scattershot, yes, but she has them. Her maths is missing entire sections, but that's still so much more than what she'd had mere months back. Yet, all she's built is a big box producing poor knockoffs of the original.
A cake is had, and Angela tries not to ruin the mood, but it's hard to feel festive when all she can think about are the possible causes for her failure.
The morning light catches her unawares, still pouring over the numbers in her room to find the discrepancy between the theory and function. As far as she can tell, there is none. As far as she can tell, there must be something wrong with the things she can tell.
Her mother notices the third time this happens - first to her knowledge. Angela's argument of easily being able to forgo a few nights of sleep does precisely nothing to stop her nagging. Neither does her promise to catch up on rest in daylight hours.
"You're a growing girl now, Angela." Her brows crease in thought, and a foreboding feeling descends upon her daughter. "Actually, now that I said it, you should sleep more, not less."
That, Angela realises, is actually a possibility she's not considered before, and one alarming enough she calls Uncle that night to make inquiries.
"I don't know. Normally, children your age-" Not her age. Her body's age. "-need something like…"
"Ten to twelve hours."
"Twelve hours? My God, no wonder children are running everywhere all the time! Can you imagine having just twelve hours to do everything you need to do in a day?!"
As a matter of fact, Angela can not. That is why she's calling.
They eventually decide her regular four hours appear to be enough. After all, she has been growing, and if the worst comes to worst, she can always add a few more centimetres manually in the future.
Angela contemplates adding all the missing centimetres she should already have at once. It smarts something fierce when Brigitte drags her out of the house to play in the snow with her friends, only for said friends to dismiss Angela's claims to adulthood based solely on her diminutive height. Enough so that when her sister next demands her participation in a snowball fight, she brings along the relic of a trophy that her university index book is, with all the stamps and signatures giving it due legitimacy needed to display on a shelf beside her diploma one day. She can't deny it's gratifying to have the children look at her in awe rather than accuse her of lying.
Productive as her Christmas break is, she can't deny a sense of relief she feels upon returning to Zurich. She loves her sister, but she's a very demanding creature, that one, and one difficult to deal with when trying to work.
And there's much work to be done! Over the coming months she fixes as many issues with her technology as possible, but for every one problem she manages to solve, another takes its place. The excessive buildup of scar tissue? How about not enough scar tissue? The fresh flesh is too soft to allow movement without tearing? Her workaround instead causes the scar to harden to the point of causing a loss of mobility. Other times, for no discernable reason at all, the procedure doesn't leave any scar tissue whatsoever. It's as if the code she's programmed the nanites with is alive to pick and choose which parts of itself to ignore or adhere to.
It's not all failure, though. Even the defective units are still miles ahead of what she managed to achieve previously, and lightyears ahead of anything else in the world that isn't Uncle's. Her work doesn't quite defy the laws of physics, but according to her father, it's a damn near thing, with margins no less precise than what she's told neurosurgeons need their massive machines to achieve. It's so far ahead, in fact, that her engineering course allows her to write her thesis two years in advance, seeing no point to keeping her confined to petty coursework. Her paper ends up appearing more like a book in the end due to all the step-by-step instructions necessary for her professors to grasp its contents. Writing it is an exercise of patience unlike any she's been through so far, but it's a necessary one. The day will come when her machines will be mass-produced. Dumbing it all down for the average person to build and operate is a requirement, not an option.
Conventional surgery, in contrast, is almost a meditative experience. Compared to the things Angela works on in her spare time, learning the ins-and-outs of the human body is a starkly simple affair. Come her first supervised procedure she finds it almost relaxing. Almost. It's still a life that she holds in her hand, and she still needs to perform it standing on a chair. It's a very satisfying thing to see her task completed without a fault, to sew her patient back up and know she's given him life. Blue goes with blue, red with red.
Simple.
Her mind wanders as her hands do the work. How unnecessary all this could be. Had she already completed her work, cutting out the cancerous growth on her patient's stomach would be as easy as him swallowing a vitamin pill with his breakfast. Why, if such treatment became routine, the cancer would never have settled in the now half-ruined organ in the first place, cured as a side effect of treating some other ailment, like the common cold. Truth be told, with barely any tweaks to the technology, organs themselves could be rendered almost redundant. Oh, a kidney would still be necessary for the nexus point it provides to dispose of the waste in blood, but it could be a bladder for all the difference it would make with the nanites substituting blood cells.
It is there in the Zurich University Hospital, standing on a chair and hands bloodied, that it first occurs to Angela how endlessly inefficient the human body is. Even her own. Perhaps especially her own, given how the machines making up her blood operate under the brute force principle of repairing any and all damage regardless of its severity. The fabricator attached to her heart could replace said muscle altogether, it is but a pump, an easiest thing to build. Her stomach, her entire digestive system really, could be done away with in favour of a nutrition fluid injected directly into her fabricator pump. Her kidney could well be merged with the bladder, since that would have to stay to eject debris from her bloodstream every now and then even should she succeed in eliminating the need to urinate by overcoming the inefficiency of ejecting what is almost entirely just water. The reduction in required fluid intake alone…
Huh.
"Everything alright?" her supervising surgeon asks when she pauses in stitching her patient back up.
"Yes, yes of course. I was letting my hands rest."
It occurs to her that even though genius, Uncle's tech only treats the symptoms rather than the root cause. Sure, his nanites destroy any illness and mutation in its infancy, but would it not be better still to remove even the chance for such infancy to occur? Even in her very own body there are organs she could remove without any negative side-effects. Her bone marrow, for example, only serves to produce red blood cells that are immediately consumed: by her fabricator for building material, by her nanites for energy, and according to Uncle's notes, to reduce the volume of matter in the circulatory system to keep blood pressure optimal. Thing is, the fabricator doesn't need the red cells for building blocks. The nanites are already programmed to manage materials in her body. As such, removing the marrow from her bones, and red blood cells with it, would overall lower the energy requirement of her body while also removing a component her nanomachines need to care for. More than that, without marrow, the bones in the skeleton serve only the function of supporting and protecting the body, something a great many other materials would do a better job of.
Using a sturdy synthetic material would greatly reduce the wear of it, as well as completely remove the option for an illness to develop in the bone.
More relevant for Angela is the fact a synthetic replacement is a much easier material to account for than anything biological by the virtue of not being alive. If she can program her nanites to build living cells, she can certainly program them to build unliving material. One that will not mutate, or be any weaker than its constituent parts.
It's almost summer break again before the first batch is complete. The biggest hurdle comes in the form of whatever unholy process Uncle's nanites use to convert biological matter into anything and everything. Alchemy, in essence. Not even wholesale copying the code helps - the nanites either just do nothing, or melt trying to. Uncle is completely useless on the issue, the many things he says like smoke in her memory; clearly there, and without a way to grasp them. Eventually she puts the development off for a later date, and simply supplies the fabricator with raw materials for the nanites to pick apart. She needs a working prototype, not the finished product, even if matter conversion is absolutely key for the final version. Compared to that, the time she spends on ensuring the synthetics will mesh and work with the organics feels more like a vacation. It's no easy work to fool the body into treating synthetics as its own biomass, but it's work she understands, and that makes all the difference.
When the time comes to put the scalpel to a mice belly, the reaction to the cut is almost immediate. A red glow lights up at the insertion point, then steadily follows the line of the incision roughly at the pace Angela's made it. In a matter of seconds, the finger-length wound is closed with only a thin silver line left behind.
She traces the plastic-like smooth scar in wonder. She had hoped, but after so many failures she no longer expects everything to just- work. To the point she quickly grabs another mouse to repeat the trial, then another, cutting ever deeper with each successive specimen, each with the same result - a smooth silver line filling the opening.
Another week passes during which Angela keeps the nanites she's injected the rodents with turned on before she finally, tentatively, calls her latest idea a success. The mice are all alive, the synthetic flesh doesn't appear to cause any adverse reactions, and the natural immune system seems to treat the added bits as its own. The scar, if it can even be called such, doesn't fade, but that's to be expected seeing as it's not actually skin and muscle, even if it performs just the same.
It's a complete success.
Angela leans back in her chair, mind blank in the face of such an alien experience. Usually, resolving one problem only unearths another in her research. For everything to work as intended, however simplistic the work, is a first she has no experience with. What does she do now? She's always had her path set by following the unending line of issues to resolve.
Eventually, she grabs her phone to send her parents a simple message.
'I think I have it.'
What follows is a summer of her and her parents busily rewriting Uncle's code to fit with Angela's new nanites. They're basic, without the functions of an immune, cancer-preventive, cardiovascular, and most other systems, only working to knit broken flesh together with a synthetic weave. But they work. To the point that when she presents them to her supervisor, he takes her to the University Hospital director to feel out the possibility for clinical trials.
Her father is much less enthusiastic than herself when she calls to tell him, insisting that she patent it immediately to avoid any legal issues in the future. Angela is unconcerned about anyone being able to replicate her feat, but follows the man's advice regardless. It's easier than explaining the breadth and depth of her certainty that no-one will be able to reproduce her work for years to come at the very least. The whole legal affair does, however, have one positive effect Angela actually cares about - it forever attaches her name to the technology.
It still comes as a surprise when Jack Morrison himself pulls her aside when she's visiting her father in his workplace. The man, as far as Angela can tell, is physically perfect. By which she means model perfect. The sort of perfection one would need to devote his entire lifestyle to achieve with a daily exercise regime and diet that would be untenable for anyone for whom looking like this is not a job. Soldiers need to eat to build their muscles first and foremost, and secondly to form a healthy reserve of fat for prolonged deployment. Function over form. Not so with him.
"Why are you like this?" The words, her first words to the commander of Overwatch, slip out of her mouth before she can cram her foot in it. A flush crawls up her cheeks, one which will prove easy enough to replicate by the many people, her parents included, who will never let her live the introduction down.
The man himself, thankfully, takes the words in good cheer once she stumbles over herself with an apology. More important for all the parties concerned is his probing as to Angela's plans after the university. The question is not asked outright, but there are only so many ways to interpret being told of how Overwatch is always on the lookout for more talented individuals when the words are directed at one. Doubly so for with father's congratulations for catching the commander's eye.