In mere months, her prototype reaches functionality on par and beyond with that which it took an entire team of scientists two years of effort. Angela tries not to remind everyone she had told them so, and to limit her pointed looks whenever her underlings present their work and it needs no more fixes as opposed to the bad old days of such always being necessary. It's a half-hearted effort at least half the time, but it wouldn't do to rub having been right this whole time in her teams' noses too much. She'll keep that for when next anyone has the gal to contradict her on the matters of her own research.
Across every front they improve beyond the soon-to-hit-production organic variant, and the backlog of functions they have the code to improve on is considerable indeed. The PFUMN originally was meant to be more than it ended up being - not just a life-saving device, but also one of convenience. A multi-purpose tool to combat most, eventually all illness. As is, it may guarantee a cancer patient will survive and recover from their surgery with more of the organ affected than they would've otherwise, but it could've been as simple as hooking them up to a box and letting them walk out of the clinic an hour later cancer-free, as well as with fixed eyesight or prostate or whatever other health issues they would have to undergo a different procedure for. A panacea.
They're not quite there yet, unfortunately. Perhaps without the forced-upon delay in the form of an inferior product. Perhaps not. Though it's a strikingly less complicated matter than the work of the last two years, it only speaks to the difficulties they've faced, not the efforts yet ahead of them. Angela's nanotechnology isn't the most advanced in the world that people know of because it is easy to create.
Still. Far easier when the calculated outcome need not be adjusted between five and twenty times in hopes one of those will prove beneficial rather than the opposite, and half the time ending up having to scrap the whole thing anyway just to repeat the process exactly as was to a different end. They can actually troubleshoot now!
Which is a good thing in general, but especially for one Genji Shimada.
She's about ready to call it a night when the Commander himself enters her otherwise empty laboratory.
"Ziegler. Prep the operating room. We've got an incoming VIP."
Said VIP, Angela is told on the way, has been moved all the way from Japan for the purpose of using the only currently available PFUMN in the world, without which, the doctors who initially treated the patient half the world across have decided, the man has slim chance of recovery. An assessment with which Angela concurs upon reading the extensive list of injuries inflicted upon Mr. Shimada. Although calling it that is quite the understatement.
What they deliver to her is in truth a dead man.
Oh, he's not dead just yet. Not in technical terms. His brain is about the only important organ with a decent range of remaining functionality, while all the rest have been subsidised via an array of externals. And for good measure. With both the heart and lungs disabled, one through a sizable puncture, the other lacerations, and apparently inhalation injury, an ongoing transfusion is the only thing keeping the man from going over. Judging by the amount of leakage, none of the patient's blood can be originally his own, a few dozen or so times over. Who is this man that such an effort would be taken to save his life, and by Overwatch itself no less?
Angela puts her curiosity aside for the moment. Knowing will help neither of them right now.
Though that's not saying much. Precious few things in the world could help the man now. Angela can tell at a glance, and has it confirmed by Athena, that using her Overwatch-approved nanites will put a strain on the man's body which will risk pushing him over. Even should he survive, the damage is extensive enough the cure would leave him crippled. The PFUMN nanomachines, while capable of plugging the gaps, fill said gaps with tissue one could charitably call imperfect. For emergency response that is fine. A scarred heart is better than a punctured one. A hardened artery will do the job until a more permanent solution is implemented.
Individually, it's all fine.
The problem with Mr. Shimada is that his whole body is one giant wound, and so it would become one giant scar. His limbs alone, of which one has arrived separately and one not at all, would suffer a catastrophic reduction in functionality, let alone the organs! Whatever would happen to his heavily burned skin, she can't even tell with the extent of the damage present, but it wouldn't be anything good. He'd be crippled, if not for life then certainly for years to come while he was brought back to health piece by piece, surgery after surgery, and could look forward to decades of physical therapy. She tells the Commander this.
"Whatever it takes to keep him alive," Morrison tells her in turn, and the words ignite something in her stomach she lacks the words to describe.
Well then.
There is no conventional way of saving what remains of Mr. Shimada's organs, not if she's to give the man his life back instead of just extending it. To that end, in a less dire situation, transplants would be the go-to solution. Those, however, are trying even for an otherwise healthy body when only one organ needs replacement. Moreover, there is never a guarantee they'll take, and Angela can say with confidence that the undamaged spleen, liver and testicles will not be enough to support life functions. No. Transplantation is simply too risky here.
She could keep the man alive without immediate and drastic action. Seal him back together and plug the gaps with her tech, then continue to keep him on life support and successively add the missing organs at proper, safe intervals. Which would take months of effort on the doctors' part, and of life wasted being bedridden on his. A step-up from wholesale transplantation as far as safety goes, certainly, but hardly ideal.
But there is no need to stick with organic solutions. Internal organ prosthetics could be the way here. Both safer than the first and faster than the second option in the short term. In the longer perspective, this would also inevitably create a slew of issues regarding the maintenance of all the organs she'd have to replace alongside the limbs.
She can do better.
Her approved nanites may not save him, but her prototype? The Commander did say to do whatever she must to save the man, and by her definition this includes saving him from unnecessary hardship in the future. By using the better version of her tech she can not only give the man his life back, she can prove to everyone the superiority of PFUMN 2.0 (name pending) and move past this irrational aversion to merging synthetics with flesh! How lucky it is for them both that Mr. Shimada has been handed into her care.
A course of action set, Angela sends for all she'll need in the coming procedure.
Which isn't much at all. Just her invention and the base materials like polymer, silicon, and conductors ground up into gravel from which the nanites and synthetic flesh will be constructed from. The matter conversion performed by Uncle's technology is still firmly outside her grasp, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Her patient, therefore, will need a second stomach of sorts to house the building blocks for the fabricator and nanites to use. To that end she'll have to shorten the intestine to make space for it as well as install a valve to insert materials through… somewhere, but that can all be done at a later date. A funnel will work well enough to supply the fabricator for the surgery's duration.
Angela decides against calling up her surgeon team, it'd be an hour before they got here, minds dull with sleep, and Mr. Shimada needs help right away. The night shift might not have the know-how of operating her technology, but they won't need it. The surgery ahead will be a long and taxing one. By the time any of that is necessary, her team will have arrived refreshed and ready for overtime. In the meantime there's a considerable amount of prep work to be done. She is yet to figure out the esoteric ability of Uncle's nanites to determine whether a limb or organ is turned upside down. To that end, everything needs to be put in order manually. Things which came loose need to be stitched together lest she risk the organs healing wrong, like an unset bone.
And so, after setting up her stool by the operating table, Angela begins the surgery by unding what the doctors who previously operated on her patient have done by opening the man up from from his collarbone to navel.
"What the hell happened to him?" Her acting assistant voices all their thoughts.
To call the man's insides a mess would be an understatement. A mess is a punctured stomach spilling bile on its neighbours. A mess is twenty-three stab wounds which Angela dealt with three months back. A ruptured colon could inarguably be called a mess, and a particularly unpleasant one at that.
All of that at once, what appears to be semi liquified lungs, and the general likeness of the intestine to a stirred up spaghetti calls for an altogether more dire description.
"Must've been some scuffle," she replies.
The young man snorts into his mask. "Yeah, I- actually, no. I can't imagine."
"Good for you." Angela can. Sort of. She chooses not to think of such frightful violence. "Alright, let's focus. We've got all this to scoop up and put back together."
An exaggeration if ever there was one. Any scooping would be liable to damage the overly fragile tissue further, and the lungs in particular they need to work around carefully, what with their jelly-like consistency and half the fortitude. It's as if the man breathed-in plasma. In fact, much of the insides appear as if slightly microwaved, corresponding to the, in places, molten skin. It is also the main source of trauma by the virtue of sheer volume. And they wanted to use her inferior nanites to fix this. Many organs would fuse together or become naught but scar tissue, like the lungs. Those would be completely useless afterwards. She'll grant her fellow professionals the benefit of the doubt and assume their solution to be nothing more than a last ditch effort. The alternative is simply too unflattering.
The work is slow, but steady. Detaching blood vessels and nerves is a delicate task, and her tech is not yet at the level of molecular manipulation to for all intents and purposes magic a bundle of nerves out of thin air. Perhaps it would've been if not for the delay, but the reality is what it is, and while her nanites can repair damaged microvessels, they still lack the perfect precision of the original. Now, that won't be forever, and she can actually explain her invention's inner workings to another person with the expectation they'll remember it. As such, she's already leagues ahead of Uncle where it actually matters. So there.
The sunrise comes, and a few hours later, so does her own team. Which is good news, because by that point, the night shift is visibly only kept alert by stress and the twenty minutes break around four AM during which burgers with fries and mayonnaise were had. Angela must admit to being immensely curious of whether Mr. Shimada will share with her the ability to forgo sleep for weeks at a time, or if it actually is not the regenerative capacity of nanites that is responsible for allowing her this. Animals tend to sleep most of the day unless prompted otherwise, whether tired or not, so testing on that front has so far been inconclusive.
Come noon, Angela begins the work of reattaching everything inside that came loose while the rest of the team puts the intestine in order and back in one piece. This alone would take days were she anyone else, but with the treatment she's decided on, there's no need for quadruple sutures on every cut, tear, and break. All she needs is for the organs to stay in proper shape and connected, even loosely, to where they're supposed to connect. A single layer is entirely sufficient for that. Still. Having to stitch dozens of such singular layers takes its time and toll. By the time her patient is put back in order it is once again nearing sunrise and half her staff is in the break room, where Angela sent them for their minds to join their sleeping hands. A shame about them not being able to witness the culmination of their efforts, but if they're not being useful then they have no place in her operating theatre.
The three of them who remain lower Mr. Shimada's new and improved heart into its new home cavity, and begin the last leg of their journey in attaching it to the bypasses they've prepared in advance. They manage the feat in just over an hour with the increased room for error allotted to them by the nature of the device being connected. Any gaps and imperfections will be fixed the moment it becomes operational.
Lastly, they close up as much as possible around the life support tubing still supplying the man with blood and oxygen, as it will continue to do while the lungs are being fixed.
Ready as can be, Angela activates the prototype.
Little happens at first that is visible to the naked eye, but the nanites already in the chamber release to spread across the body and gather data on its state, then run it against the base blueprint to determine irregularities. The process is made to be fully automated going forward, but first use is to be supervised by a professional to ensure no errors are made. Finding only perfectly digitised patchwork of Mr. Shimada's body, Angela commences the second phase - the nanite production.
The human body needs about five litres of blood, depending on size, gender, and age. Uncle's nanomachines are more efficient, with only a little under three litres necessary for day-to-day activity. Her own, slightly larger and heavier, would nonetheless take up about three and a half litres worth of space in her own body. By a rough estimate, her patient will need around four .
But that is on a normal day.
As soon as Angela ticks the question box, the machine whirs to life with a vengeance, intent on filling the body to the bursting and then some in response to such widespread trauma. The mending process begins as soon as the nanites leave the man's new heart, lighting up with a red glow as they spill outwards to fill the gaps in flesh with a silvery sheen. Gentle at first, the glow grows in strength as more and more nanites join in the effort to seal the wounds and smooth out the burns. A few minutes in, it becomes strong enough to be faintly visible through the skin. Another few more pass before much of Mr. Shimada appear as hot iron, burned throughout as he was. Before long, Angela could turn off the lights and still see the room with a measure of detail. Some areas, like the legs and chest, glow strongly in particular with all the additional damage visited upon them. But the cuts and tears there are the easiest thing to fix - nothing more than displaced cells in need of glue. Burn injury, in contrast, means wholesale tissue breakdown under chemical processes or even water expansion occurring inside the cells. A far more difficult sort of damage to dispose of.
Witnessing it being unmade by her technology is a magnificent sight. A validation of a decade-long effort. And this is just the beginning!
Angela reaches for her tablet with a small smile. The data should-
Huh.
She glances at the nurse and technician pouring the synthetic feed into the funnel at steady intervals. The output numbers appear the same as they did ten minutes ago, and the gravel drains down the funnel just the same also, so the fabricator is indeed still running. How come then, that according to the data on display the total number of nanites is increasing at four tenths the pace? A software bug? Must be. Her nanites are supposed to withstand months of operation before recycling. She can imagine them breaking down in a few days under strenuous use, but not in under an hour. Could the materials be at fault?
"Can you smell that?" Erika speaks up, breaking Angela out of her reverie.
"Smell what?"
"Like… circuitry?"
Angela rips the mask off her face. The air does indeed carry a faint smell of old electronics over the permeating smell of the patient's insides.
Her eyebrows draw as she again looks at the tablet to see the numbers rapidly decline. The total is now three tenths and slowing. Two and a half. Two. One.
Angela observes, dumbfounded, as it starts going down.
She steps back on her stool to inspect her patient, and yelps back when her hand brushes against his glowing leg, the surprise almost having her fall down if not for the Martin holding her up.
"What's wrong?"
Without answering, Angela reaches for the limb again, and this time only scowls in discomfort when her skin makes contact with the unnaturally hot surface. Hotter than any body can be on its own. Hot enough the discomfort quickly becomes pain. Hot enough for her fingertips to faintly glow when she draws them back. Shit.
"I don't know. Check his temperature. I'm turning the nanites off."
In the end, they do not check Mr. Shimada's temperature. There's no need. Almost as soon as Angela disables her nanites the previously faint smell asserts itself as burnt metal. That alone would be a problem, but it's not the dark plume of smoke rising from the funnel which makes Angela's insides run cold. Although yes, it's troubling as the 2.0 has a self-repair function. It's the sizzling. The sizzling and the smell keeping it company, one much worse than any burning metal.
Immediately she turns the nanites back on. Even though they're the only plausible cause, disabling them clearly made things even worse, and whatever is happening they'll at least buy her time. Under five minutes, by the look of the declining total on her display. No. Less. It's accelerating. What's worse, the fabricator output is declining as well, which will compound and accelerate the problem.
Alright. Okay. Okay, she needs- she needs to-
She slaps her shaking hands against her cheeks, splattering them with gore from her gloves.
She needs to calm down, first and foremost. Second. She needs a way to stop the damage from occurring once her nanites shut down. What's causing the damage? Her nanites. Must be. Burns. Ice bath? No. Shimada was sizzling. He'll boil the water before he cools down. There isn't a way to cool him down.
She pulls her glove off to put bare skin on the man's forehead. It's bad. Uncomfortable. Very. But not painful. For now. Legs much hotter. Scalding. The barely-damaged arm? Uncomfortable. Chest?
Angela draws back with a hiss.
Painful. Heavily damaged areas worst affected. Nanites flocked to those areas. Nanites the cause. Have to remove them. Transfusion? No time. Nanites are fixing the damage they're causing. They'll all fail before they get them out. Fry, melt, and fuse. Neutralise? With what? Her own blood? Maybe. Doesn't solve the heat. Need to get rid of heat. Get rid of-
"Okay! Erika, get me a power saw! Martin, run to the lab, bring my fridge here, it's uh- it's by the 3D printer." The pair look at each other, startled at the orders after failing to get a reaction out of her for a good ten seconds. "What are you waiting for? Run! Go, go, go!"
For her part, Angela scoops up the biggest syringe they used so far from the trash bin, giving it a quick wipe before also procuring a bucket after throwing out the cleaning supplies inside. She sits down on her stool and rolls up her sleeves. This is going to suck, but it's the best chance her patient has got.
Technically speaking, for a person to live no body is needed. It is entirely a tool of acquisition and delivery of materials necessary for the survival of the brain. Now, the brain alone is not responsible for making a human, but it is where one is stored as such. A brain in a jar given the control of a body would behave and develop very differently from one housed in a skull for the variety of chemical inputs one would lack and the other receive. However, for the purpose of simply keeping Mr. Shimada safe and sound, he doesn't need his body below the neck. In fact, being connected to it at the moment is actively detrimental to the man's health as entropy takes its place and spreads deadly slag to every nook and cranny of his body.
This, normally, would be a bit of a conundrum given that disconnecting a head from its body most commonly results with death.
That said, no creature dies the moment its brain is separated from the body, because it isn't the body which contains said creature. It's the brain. Upon severing it from the rest of an organism it will remain functional for however long the blood present in the head at the time can sustain it. Which is usually a very short time indeed. In theory, it should absolutely be possible to replace the nutrition delivery system - the body - for anything else which will do the same job. That is not the contested point among the scientific community nowadays. The point of contention is that nobody has managed the feat on any brain of decently advanced complexity so far.
Or rather, nobody the world at large knows of.
Through no fault of her own, Angela remembers little of the explanation behind the device concerned; certainly none of its inner workings, but she remembers enough. Knows enough. What she needs is a delivery system that will supplement the natural efforts of the body in its absence. As it happens, she has one on hand.
She'd rather do this with her own work, but that is clearly not an option at the moment, neither is dragging-in a PFUMN 1.1.7 when an infinitely better iteration is present for use.
"Dr. Ziegler?" Athena voices sounds out from the alarm system in an approximation of concern as she puts the syringe over one of her scars. She doesn't stop. There isn't time. A brilliant red fluid fills the barrel, and a deeply unpleasant filling spreads through Angela's forearm as overmuch blood is at once pulled from it. A litre should suffice. She'll take two. It makes little difference whether she loses a litre or ten. The gentle whirring in her heart is proof enough of that.
"Yes?" She empties the syringe into the bucket before repeating the process.
"I am compelled to remind you that recycling used-up syringes goes against basic health protocol. I must also question the purpose of filling a bucket with your blood."
Ah. Right. That would look suspicious to the uninitiated, among whose ranks Athena figures.
"Don't worry about it, I'm preparing a transfusion for my patient."
Out of her arm and into the bucket. Now eighteen more.
"You appear to be in a state of shock. Please stop or I'll be forced to call security."
She does stop, if only for a second. She can't have security anywhere near until she's done here.
"I've been testing my nanites on myself. None of this is actual blood." Seventeen. "Trust me. I know what I'm doing."
Sixteen.
Fifteen.
"Understood." Fourteen. Time to switch the arm. "Going forward, please trust your assistant enough to notify her of such trials before conducting them."
Thirteen. A grimace twists Angela' lips, and not just at the ant-like sensation of blood rushing from her heart to a numbed arm. It's a well-deserved admonishment, or it would be if she weren't purposefully misleading the AI, though the fact doesn't make her feel any better. Especially given what she's about to ask for.
"I will. I'm sorry." And she is. But she simply can't tell the truth. Not now. Perhaps not ever. It… she is beholden to her programming. Any person with high enough rank may ask the Athena to divulge any secret the AI's been told, and she will have no choice but to comply. If it got out what her technology is based on, there is no doubt in Angela's mind of the fool's errand she'd be ordered to take up again. Only, this time it wouldn't be just until she got something functional out again. Not with an alchemist stone in her chest.
No-one can know. Ever. Not in a hundred years. Understand?
Mother was more right than she knew. It's not just her life on the line. It's millions. Tens and hundreds of millions that could die if she were made to waste her time again instead of focusing on defeating death like she knows is possible.
…Millions. Let's focus on saving just one for now.
Twelve.
"I need you to disable the cameras in this room." If the AI was about to call security on her for drawing her blood with a dirty syringe, she can't imagine the response to the procedure ahead being any different.
"You do not have the authorization needed to give me such an order."
Actually, she just might.
"The Commander said to do what I must to save Mr. Shimada." She pauses, thinking over how best to use Morrison's words. "In order to do that, I need you to disable the cameras here."
Eleven.
Ten.
"Camera feed disabled. Be careful, Angela. I will be busy unless you call me."
"Thank you." She smiles, wishing the cameras were on a short few seconds longer. An AI of Athena's calibre can't be too busy to keep tabs on her. "I will be."
She is two portions away from finishing when the nurse bursts through the door with a power saw, and properly winded to boot. Good. Martin better arrive in just the same state or he can kiss his position on her team goodbye.
"Doctor Ziegler?" The woman freezes at the sight of Angela.
"Put it on the table and plug it in, thank you. Then get out."
"What?"
"Out. And don't let anyone but Martin in." She pins the wide-eyed woman with a hard look, one undermined by having to look up, but effective enough for the nurse to nod and promptly leave. She can't have anyone interfere. She knows this is possible. They don't.
With the last two doses added to the bucket, Angela leans her head against the table while feeling comes back to her hand. Only a little bit lightheaded, she pulls herself up to check on Mr. Shimada's head. A hiss blows past her teeth once she puts her hand on his forehead, but she can keep the contact. A glance at the tablet confirms the nanite count has halved, and keeps getting worse just like she predicted.
Her technician's breathless arrival draws her attention away from the display.
"Finally. Put it here and wait outside. Out. Out, I said!"
With all the materials finally on hand, Angela throws herself at the task ahead.
First, she mixes the strawberry milk from the fridge with her blood and gives it a good stir, after which she establishes a link between the bucket and the tablet. With no time to set the dose up in detail, she forces a factory reset to wipe the blueprint of her own body from the memory cloud. Hopefully, the nanites will acknowledge the synthetic filling as part of the body, and if not… she'll think of something to explain the perfect skin away.
So prepared, Angela turns off the life support before prying off the lid from the fluid chamber, and pours her blood in. Right away the mixture lights up as the nanites repurpose the fluid inside for their own use, but Angela is already pulling the tubing out from her patient's chest. It comes out easily enough, plastic with heat as it is.
Then, she places the whirring sawblade above the hollow of Mr. Shimada's neck.
The next minute is a blur. A flurry of adrenaline-fueled activity Angela will find herself having trouble recalling as soon as it ends. She attaches tubes to the exposed arteries, foregoing the drainage at first as she flips the life support back on to shave a few seconds off the process. Only after the machine starts pumping the goo does she make to finish the connections, just in time for the jugulars to start spewing fluid again. At last, Angela switches over to her PFUMN control and disables it for the last time, along with all its produce.
At once, the sizzling returns, twice as bad as before and with a smell of burnt plastic to boot. But it's all contained to the body. The head, now a secure distance away, lights up for just a moment as the gaping neck wound seals up. And then nothing more happens while the rest of Genji Shimada's body starts bursting at the seams, steaming, spilling, and giving off a stench such as Angela's not smelled in almost twenty years.
She braces herself against the table, suddenly feeling ready to fall over. But she still has a job to do, and so before anything else she checks the vitals. The skin is warm, but pleasantly so, and has gained a healthy sheen to it for the first time since Angela has laid her eyes on the man. She rolls back an eyelid, and the pupil shrinks at the harsh surgical light above. There isn't a pulse as such, but the goo enters a light red, then leaves a shade darker. She reaches for the tablet for more detail to find absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Everything is… normal.
It worked.
Taking care not to fall over, Angela slowly lowers herself down onto the floor, where she rests her back against the table leg. Done at last, she allows the shakes to take over her hands, and soon enough her whole body. A single bark of laughter explodes from her lungs.
She did it.
She did it and it actually worked.
She saved Genji Shimada.