Angela is twenty five, and somewhat less enthused about celebrating receiving her doctorate than she perhaps should be, and not only for her family's sake. Die Produktionseinheit für medizinische Nanomaschinen (or PFUMN for short) has gone through medical trials at a truly trailblazing pace of mere six months, courtesy of WHO, and is set to go into commercial production by the end of the year once Mother finalises the matters of licencing. If there's one good thing about having been forced to stunt her own tech, it's the fact that, deficient as it is, it will at last be saving lives.
Had the Commander possessed a spine made of a material other than tissue paper, her nanomachines could already have saved tens of thousands at the least, with hundreds of thousands more to follow once the technology proved itself and went into proper mass-production. Senseless death, all of it. And all it would've taken to prevent was taking a stance against the grain on one man's part.
It's infuriating, and still a better deal for the world than any other solution she can think of. She refuses to sell the rights to her invention for some speculant to gouge the hospitals across the world for all they'll pay. Her PFUMNs are pricey to produce, certainly, but with splitting the production between four manufacturers with more to come in the future, it shouldn't be anything prohibitive. Or so her parents say.
It is also aged twenty five, a few hours after her doctorate celebration, that she spots a box of tampons while looking for a new tube of toothpaste in her family house, prompting her for the first time to ponder the matter of her non-existent period. Now, it is not particularly unusual for girls her body's age to not have yet gone through their first yet, but most girls that age are also not in a mathematically perfect health that would allow their bodies to develop at the earliest convenience - the matter of Uncle's experiments potentially stunting her growth aside.
Angela isn't sure whether she should even be worried or not. It could well be her endometrium is either cannibalised, or being continuously maintained instead of being allowed to die and be shed like it would happen to any other woman - a minor issue that all but the manufacturers of hygienic supplies would welcome. She herself is certainly not longing for the unpleasantry of dealing with all the related troubles..
But then, it could also well be something less innocuous.
Uncle, for once, seems stupified by the very question.
"I never considered human reproductive tracts specifically. It might be me, it might not. What I can say for sure is that yes, human babies can be born by men with implanted baboon uteruses. Do get back to me once you figure this out, will you?"
"...t-the what?"
"Baboons. Their uteruses are somewhat less problematic to extract than human ones. Or- well. There's less trouble disposing of the evidence, anyway."
Angela cuts the call before any more memories of helping Uncle dispose of the evidence surface in her mind than the words have already dragged up. But yes. She does suppose getting rid of a baboon is somewhat easier than of a human carcass.
Finding the cause of her potential infertility proves frustratingly difficult. Not for any medical reason, mind, but simply due to how unwieldy inspecting her own womb proves to be on her lonesome. The lack of dedicated machinery aside, among the many talents Angela can boast of possessing, contortionism falls squarely outside her abilities. Her old textbooks are likewise not very useful for her purposes, seeing as she'd not taken up gynaecology. To the best of her knowledge, she is in perfect health, and brute-forced back into it whenever outside factors attempt to change the situation for the worse.
Ultimately, out of better ideas, Angela follows the collective wisdom of every other girl in a similar situation before her, and brings the topic up with her mother.
"You mean it wasn't on purpose?" The woman appears startled by the topic. "We thought it was just a quality of life improvement programmed into your nanites. Are you sure you're not just a late bloomer? Brigitte's not had hers yet, either."
"Brigitte's eleven. And anyway, all the other symptoms of puberty have started setting in a while ago. I'm pretty sure it's not normal."
Having to go to another doctor feels faintly humiliating after all the advances Angela has made all across the medical field, but she trusts a fellow professional, one picked by her mother no less, to shine light on an issue she herself has proven unable to.
The first visit is a disappointment. They find nothing wrong, nor anything unusual for a correctly developing fifteen-year-old, which in itself is unusual as it means something is most definitely amiss given the existence of her issue. What that something is, proves to be an infinitely more elusive answer to find, with one battery of tests after another proving only Angela's perfect health.
With no answers forthcoming, Angela does what she never before considered. She turns off her nanites.
It requires preparation, of course. Things like readying a full five litre blood transfusion. Programming an emergency reset should her life be in danger. Disinfecting every inch of her house in case her natural immune system has atrophied in the absence of anything at all to do. Preparing a battery of tests and checks to perform in the month the experiment is to take. Honestly, securing a leave, her first in the three years she's worked for Overwatch, is a piece of cake comparatively. Commander Morrison doesn't ask a single question. Angela thinks the man is feeling apologetic for delaying her research by two years. As he should be.
She falls sick on the second day. A common cold by the looks of it, though it certainly feels anything but common with the way it renders Angela bedridden, shaking, and almost unable to breathe; certainly unable to walk, as she learns upon falling to the ground when getting out of the bed in the morning. Everything aches. Every noise is a needle in her scalp. To call her immune system atrophied is an understatement of the British sort. She flushes her body with a mix of antibiotics and phages, then sleeps the rest of the day away.
The third day goes better, in that she manages to move around her apartment with only a little difficulty, and in that most of the shakes subside with her fever going down to a manageable level. Most of her muscles still ache, her brain included. Her nose is completely clogged up, and she dares not venture out to buy any additional medicine she didn't think to stock up on in the fear of catching something even worse - like almost anything at all out there - waiting one additional day for the delivery instead.
It seems the last time her body updated its disease database was before Uncle's procedure. Every wide-spread virus has since mutated so far as to be unrecognisable by what's left of her natural defences. It's all almost enough to make her abandon her experiment. Almost. Her work is to elevate humanity above any defects. To that end, a design flaw causing issues with the reproductive system is unacceptable, and seeing as she's the only human sample that she knows of in existence, it falls on her to figure out how to fix it. The sickness will do well as a reminder of what she aims to banish from the world.
It's torture. Pure and simple. Before the end of the week she somehow manages to contract influenza, binding her to the bed for an additional three days and a diet of instant noodles, vitamins, and antibiotics.
Angela doesn't let her father in when he comes to visit, but is thankful for the groceries he leaves by the door whenever he does. In the state she's in, she wouldn't trust him to be sterile even if he showed up in a hazmat suit. She doesn't even know where she caught the flu from!
She doesn't recognise it for what it is when the pain in her abdomen first starts three weeks into her self-imposed quarantine. Not with all the other aches and pains she's been subject to. It takes finding her pyjamas and sheets stained red for her exhausted mind to finally connect the dots. It's a relief. Not to find her body working as intended, she could fix that at a later date, she's sure. It's a relief because it allows her to end the experiment the following week, once they arrange for it to happen under the gynaecologist's observation with an internal video recording for reference.
As is to be expected, the haemorrhaging membrane is shed within seconds in a flash of red light, leaving behind an unblemished surface from the month prior. This dispels the last, fringe possibility of her nanites not being responsible for the issue, while also bringing to Angela's attention a disturbing possibility. In conjunction with the fact she'd never shown signs of luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, her eggs, now accounted for and proven at least somewhat functional, are for whatever reason disallowed to burrow by her nanites, for some reason seeing the process as harmful. All in all, an overcomplicated birth control measure and a possible quality of life improvement due to halting the unpleasant parts of menstruation. An oversight to correct whatever the cause may be - not a pressing medical issue either way.
"Don't be upset sweetie, we'll figure it out."
"I'm not upset," Angela snaps, sounding very much upset. A wince passes her features. "Sorry."
"It's fine. Something's wrong with your body, it's understandable."
"Nothing's wrong with my body." She very carefully holds back from raising her voice again. Her body is working perfectly, as she's proven by turning off her nanites.
No. What makes her blood run cold is the unknown of which part of the coding is behind this issue. All the programming of her own technology is based on the very same lines among which some are responsible for a forced anticonception measure. It's entirely possible that her own tech is already contaminated with the same. Had she not realised there's a problem, her nanites would eventually be given to some unfortunate pregnant woman, and if this is how they treat an unfertilized egg, Angela has a good idea of how they would deal with a living organism of notably varying DNA growing within a womb.
Angela returns to Zurich the next day, wasting no time to grab several pregnant mice from the labs to then shoot them up with her soon-to-be commercially available nanites. Within seconds, the bleeding starts, ending before a minute comes to pass.
Six months of medical trials, alright. She wonders what else they might've missed.
She tells no one at first. There's no need. The PFUMNs are not yet in production, and the issue is almost certainly a matter of faulty software she can patch up. Instead, she shifts all her efforts into isolating the particular strand of code responsible. By turning certain programs on and off, she quickly rules out most of the functions, isolating the issue to immune-response. Problem is, there are hundreds of programs within that field alone, hundreds of lines each, and as Angela quickly finds out, it's not just one of them that's causing trouble. It's a tangle of interconnected functions that each makes the other necessary, disallowing Angela an easy solution of just taking out the offending line.
With weeks passing without a solution in sight, she finally brings the issue into the light. It's humiliating. All the more so because it's not her fault, but it's not like she can admit that. Still, it's still better than the alternative of the problem coming out when her work would inevitably be used during someone's pregnancy. Sure, there would be no legal consequences for her specifically. It's not her fault the lightspeed trials failed to catch the issue by the dint of not testing her tech on any pregnant woman (which is a bullet dodged all on its own). The possible blowback to her reputation, however, could set her back for years, and forever stain her name as someone whose inventions one should be wary of. The loss of a child would be tragic, yes. The loss of thousands of lives resulting from pulling her nanites out of use while investigating the issue would be unforgivable.
The potential millions of people whose lives would be lost out of an irrational fear of a malfunction in her tech would be nothing short of criminal.
Compared to that, Angela can deal with a little bit of humiliation from prohibiting the use of her invention during pregnancies.