There's much bustle when her team sees what's become of the man they've spent so much effort on. More than is warranted in Angela's opinion, but it is understandable emotions would be running high after all the hours she's had them put in were unmade with the severing of Mr. Shimada's head. Once they cool down and have a day to recover their strength and mental acumen from the ordeal, they will surely see the necessity of her actions.
Unfortunately, it appears the rest of Overwatch might need additional convincing.
Angela knew her chosen method for salvaging the surgery would not be too well-received, but being confined to her office on Morrison's orders is a tad bit extreme. She's no flight risk to put under the watch of an agent just outside her door. Much work yet remains, and she's done no wrong besides. She just needs to get that fact through the Commander's thick skull.
At least she's been given the consideration of being placed somewhere she may begin her work on the operative record. Formal requirements notwithstanding, Angela has a feeling she will be sorely in need of it in the days to come, if only to forward it to all the parties concerned and avoid having the exact same conversation again and again.
It also gives her time to ponder the cause of it all.
It's fairly obvious the nanites overheated, probably due to the sheer scale of the task she set them to. The waste heat was never an issue before, when the tests she conducted were on much smaller organisms, and with orders of magnitude less damage to mend. Cuts and poisons. Never burns, which are by far the worse sort of injury, and so far more labour-intensive. It was likely the extensive burns that required so much effort from the nanomachines as to scrap them. This, in turn, meant there appeared a broken mass of synthetics circulating in her patient's bloodstream she had no control over, which itself was causing yet more burns, which then needed healing, and so the vicious cycle started with none the wiser to it while it could still have been contained.
Reasonable as it is, it's all speculation for now. She'll have to examine the body before any sort of definite conclusion can be reached. That and do more testing. Stress testing, to be specific, and on something notably larger than mice. A cow or ten should be easy enough to file under expenditures in the budget next month.
She's about halfway through her report when the Commander barges in. Without knocking. All the same, and despite everything, Angela adjusts her chair's height and summons a smile to her lips. The surgery was mostly a success, after all. Plus, the room could use some positivity to balance the man's deep scowl.
"What did you do?" He all but growls as soon as the doors close behind him.
Her smile wanes a touch. It's not surprising as much as disappointing that Morrison is still feeling cross. She'd hoped that with a bit of time to cool off and survey the fruits of her labour, he'd arrive in a less combative stance than he sent her away in.
"I saved Mr. Shimada's life. Like you asked me to."
"Like I asked you to?" A dozen ways to follow up flash across the man's face before he visibly reigns himself in, channelling the excess energy into pacing about her office. "You call that saving? You cut the man's head off!"
"Yes, Commander, I noticed. I was there." She can't help but quip. It's like talking to her sister used to be when she was little. Well. She has ample experience with explaining things to children: "It had to be done. We were facing a catastrophic failure otherwise."
"And whose fault is that?" He stops for a moment, before shaking his head and resuming the pacing. "You were supposed to just- keep him alive."
"I did." Angela's voice is steel. "Commander, with all respect due to your position as the head of this organisation, I'd ask you to respect mine as the head surgeon, as well. Trust me, compared to when he arrived, your VIP is in an improved state now.
Morrison stops, staring at her blankly for a spell before collapsing into the Ikea couch she and Father put together for her guests. The thing creaks dangerously, straining under the dense mass of a supersoldier.
"How…" He trails off, looking through rather than at her, and into the beyond of his own mind. "Explain to me how he is better off without his body. Ten words or less. Please."
"Well…" Ten words or less. Honestly. So much in the world could be improved if only the people in it took proper time to understand the issues they're talking about, and the simple truth is, some topics require hours to properly dig into. Else they should trust those who have the proper expertise instead of pushing their own under-informed views. "He would've died with it. He's safe now."
"As a disembodied head." The man massages the base of his nose.
"As a disembodied head, yes. His body was killing him when he arrived." She clarifies at the incredulous glare shot from between the Commander's fingers. "And, honestly, with the amount of organs that would have needed replacement if I had used the old PFUMN, the outcome would not have been that much different to now."
"Not different? He would've had his body."
"A useless body. Worse. An anchor around his neck."
"You're missing the point, Ziegler. I brought you a man, you gave me his still-living head, which even if I put aside all the ethics of- what am I supposed to do with it?"
It's Angela's turn to give the man a bewildered stare. What does he mean; what are they supposed to do with it?
The way Angela sees it, there's a number of options to choose from going forward.
The simplest thing would be to acquire a donor's body and attach Mr. Shimada to it. This has been attempted on a few occasions this century, but much like maintaining a disembodied person's life, never worked before. Not even to her personal knowledge, although whether that's because she's unaware of it, or it didn't happen, Angela can't say. Regardless, she's already overcome the main obstacle to this procedure, that being the patient dying momentarily following having their head severed from the body. Attaching it to another would be only marginally more complicated than doing the same with a limb, and especially with her nanites assisting.
It would be the simplest solution, but hardly the best. The body, in its integrity, would almost certainly violently reject having a new head introduced upon it, and attack the foreign tissue. For any single organ or limb that is already problematic. For something as important as the brain, it is unacceptable. Immunosuppressants… could work, but unlikely to the extent necessary for a complication-free existence. A PFUMN would have to be introduced to truly contain the side-effects. Calculating the brain-to-body adjustment period would be a fanciful exercise, but it would be a long one. That is on top of the time it'd take to acquire a whole, suitable body and the legalities of it. It's one thing to donate one's organs for science or transplantation, another to have but a head left for burial.
With this in mind, the better solution would be to improve and expand on the surgery which Mr. Shimada has already undergone. Though it ultimately failed, it had only done so on the very last stretch of the entire procedure. With the exception of excessive heating, everything was working as intended. Provided a few alterations to the procedure, it could be performed even without actually fixing the underlying issue which has caused the whole dilema. Using the ruined carcass as a cast of sorts, Angela could reconstruct a synthetic body with a similar functionality to the original. The original which, given the damage she'd seen occurring even while being removed from the operating theatre, has little other use at this point. With this in mind, the flesh to synthetics conversion would be nearing total.
This would come with its own array of issues, of course. The head, being biological, would still require all the systems keeping it in working order which are normally strewn across the body, and which would be partially missing were they all made synthetic. Her work means to replicate the human body and its exact functions, only using different materials. However, her work is not yet complete, and won't be for years to come. It's one thing to have her nanites produce a stomach in which digestion can occur, it's another to have said stomach produce digestive enzymes (or something performing their function). The easy option here would be to transplant the problematic organs in. She would in effect be crafting a synthetic shell for the organs.
In both these cases, her patient would not quite be returned to full health. A body transplant would take a long time to adapt to, if ever it would. Her own tech, meanwhile, is not yet quite able to work at such a small scale as to sculpt all the nerve and circulatory endings to perfection. It would be a functional body, capable of everything needed for daily life, but no more than that.
She can do better. Really, this time.
The thing is, Mr. Shimada will need her nanomachines either way, there is no going around that. The transplanted body would need its immune system supplanted. The synthetic body would need a PFUMN to retain long-term functionality. Both these options have their shortcomings, but there is another one without.
Short of giving the man what courses through her own veins, there is no salvaging Mr. Shimada's body, and she cannot do that, else millions will suffer as a consequence. Whatever she does, her patient's body will be a total replacement. Such being the case, why stick with convention when she can improve on the original, instead? When she can design the new body with her fabricator as both the literal and metaphorical heart of it? Make it with her technology in mind rather than the other way around.
Make him as she is. Immortal. Or the next best thing. And with only a part of Uncle's code at her disposal!
"Again with the experimental treatment!" Morrison bursts at hearing her proposition. "Do you even hear yourself talking? If you didn't go above and beyond what I asked of you, Shimada would still have his body!"
"I'm not in the business of making cripples." Angela stands her ground, hopping off her chair to walk off the heat gathering in her chest. "The surgery was almost entirely a success-"
"Success?"
"Yes, success! Everything worked just as intended until the very end. And yes, mistakes were made, but I learned from them, and knowing what I know now, if I operated on Mr. Shimada again, right now you would be congratulating me instead of- this!" She makes a sweeping gesture around her office. "Why am I even under guard? I'm not going to run."
"That is… so beyond the point." Morrison, too, stands up, reminding Angela of his towering bulk in the process. "I think you learned the wrong lesson here, so let me spell it out for you. You fucked up. You were supposed to save him."
"I did save him!" She throws her arms up helplessly. Why doesn't he see that?
"He is. A head."
"That I'm saying I can attach to a new body, I don't see-'' She rakes her nails over her scalp. "I'm trying to fix this. Beheading him is just a temporary measure-"
"Oh, Jesus Christ."
"-while I work on fixing the damage."
"Then fix him." Morrison pins her down with a stare. "Don't just throw his body."
"That's not how it works, Commander, I can't undo damage, nothing can. Healing is about replacing damaged tissue with new one. That's how even our bodies work. The only difference between that and my tech is that I use different materials, that is all."
"I don't suppose you could use your original nanites, then?"
"This is the original. And he's better off having no body at all than what he'd get from using the one-one-sevens at this scale. If he lived through it. Which he wouldn't without further intervention. His insides would fuse."
A silence falls over the room, leaving Angela standing aimlessly in a space supposedly her own, with nothing to go on off.
Finally, a heavy sigh, one laden with the weight of the world, blows past the Commander's lips. As if he had the right.
"What am I supposed to do with you?"
Angela recognises the rhetorical question for what it is. All the same, it would be a waste of opportunity not to shoot her shot.
"Preferably, let me continue to treat my patient."
The Commander doesn't, unfortunately, let her continue to treat her patient. Not at first, anyway. What he does do is send her away on a mandatory R&R. As if she could have rest, much less relaxation at a time like this. Ostensibly, it's to let her recover from performing the surgery. Her assurances no such thing is necessary are met with a lack of understanding such as she previously thought only bureaucrats capable of ("You're going on a vacation, Ziegler, and that's it.") It lasts the whole of two days during which Angela catches not a wink of sleep, constantly either on the move or reviewing the designs Uncle has sketched upon her impromptu visit.
"But how did it let him speak?" She voices her confusion at the man's explanation behind the old device he dug out for her. "Is there an air pump here I can't see?"
"Oh no! That would be terribly inefficient. And noisy. No, it just reads the mind and uses a speaker to give it a voice when activated."
Like many other things pertaining to Uncle's work, Angela files the information away for whenever it should happen to become relevant. If she allows herself to go on a tangent every time he reveals some new, previously-unimaginable technology, she'd never get any work done.
She's about to board the second plane of her connecting flight to Stockholm, where she plans to break the news regarding the tenuous nature of her current employment to her parents, when the message arrives to come back to the HQ post-haste. Just as well. She's not looking forward to explaining this whole mess before it's resolved. In truth, it is somewhat bad form to leave the city while her patient remains there, but consulting the man who's done this sort of thing before was a more prudent course of action than waiting for the matter to run its course. As is, Angela expects the summons to mean her services are again required. Why else the rush? Surely no replacement has been found for her on such short notice that she'd be rushed to remove her possessions. Not like there is one who could replace her in the whole wide world.
She takes a train from Berlin rather than wait for another flight. Partly because the timetable promises her she'll arrive two hours before the next flight should, but mostly to have an opportunity to sleep for the first time since Mr. Shimada's arrival in Zurich. She mutes her phone before stashing it in her jacket's inner pocket. A decision she'll regret when two hours out from her destination still, it rings anyway, startling her awake and nearly off her seat.
"Angela Ziegler speaking." She yawns into the receiver. She hasn't had six hours of uninterrupted sleep since… around the time she was adopted, she thinks. She forgot how sluggish it makes one feel.
"Hello, Doctor Ziegler." Angela pulls the phone away to check the ID. She can't recall saving Athena's contact, either. Mostly because the AI doesn't have one. Or didn't, it seems.
"Hi? I'm- excuse me, is something the matter?"
"Please check your incoming calls. The Commander has been trying to reach you for the past four hours. So has Major Lindholm once he was consulted on the matter. They were about to call an emergency when I volunteered my services. I've already informed them you are safe and on the way."
Angela's head hits the headrest with a sigh. Did they expect she would stay in Zurich for a R&R? Well. Being fair to them, she usually would. That or Sweden. Still. It rankles that she would be presumed missing just because she wasn't found in her house or lab. She's entirely able of the spur of the moment decision to go abroad for just a day or two, even if she never actually indulges (or has) such whims.
"Thank you for letting me know."
"Of course, Angela."
She calls her father, and only her father. If the Commander wanted her to stay in the country he should've said so instead of calling it a vacation just to have her come back two days later.
"Where are you? I thought something happened!"
"Hello to you, too, Dad. I was on a trip."
"A trip."
"To cool off, yes," she supplies the pre-made excuse. People go to… places, to do… things. To rest and relax. It's not so terribly out of the ordinary that she would try it after she was shooed out of her own lab, where she would usually vent her frustrations into work.
They don't speak long, just enough to scold her about not letting him and Mother know about the trouble she's in. That and not letting anyone know where she was going - which was rather the point, and makes Angela realise she'll have to start leaving her phone behind altogether when visiting Uncle. Just in case. She'll take a scolding over the possibility of someone finding her alongside the criminal part of her family.
It's in a somewhat breathless state that Angela finds the Commander in his office, having made the last leg of her journey somewhere between running and power-walking. There, also, she finds his second - Commander Reyes. Both the men seem less-than-pleased at the sudden interruption.
"You wanted to see me, Commander."
"Six hours ago." He stresses the part. "Give us a few minutes, we're about finished."
Reyes is the first to emerge from the room, giving her a look normally reserved for having tasted spoiled milk before stalking away down the hallway. The Commander soon joins her, looking like the three minutes which have passed since took a day worth of energy out of him.
"We're going to your lab. " Is all he says, setting a pace with his long strides Angela finds awkward to keep. "When I say immediately, I mean immediately, Ziegler."
"I'm sorry Commander, I had to get back from my vacation in Italy."
The man abruptly stops, whirring around to frown down at her.
"Italy?"
"Yes? It's a popular tourist destination, I figured there must be a reason for that."
"That's not- when did you sleep? I specifically gave you and your team two days to recover before calling you back here, and most of them still look like crap."
…Oh. Well. Now she feels silly. Which in itself is silly, because it's not her fault, she did say she had no need for rest at the time. The Commander should've listened. She's the doctor. Between the two of them, she knows better when one may or may not need rest.
"On the way there and back." She lies before thinking better of it, and quickly resumes her walk to hide her flushed face away from the man, and to leave him the choice to either follow or stop her, reasonably predicting the former. It's a relief to set her own pace. "I don't need much sleep."
"Am I correct to assume it has to do with the nanites you've been using?"
Right. That. There really was no is around having to explain - or mislead, is it is - the matter ever since she improvised Mr. Shimada's transfusion, is there?
"Do you know many humans who can easily forego days of sleep without some sort of enhancement, Commander?"
"That's not an answer, Ziegler. Yes or no."
Angela rolls her eyes. Because yes it is as answer. Maybe not legally, but they're not signing a legally binding contract here.
"Yes, it's the nanites. I can stay operational for a week and some under typical effort. Possibly less under strain, but I haven't tested that."
"You've been testing on yourself?"
Well. No. But since at this point she has to commit to the lie anyway, she may as well make the most of it.
"Of course. Do you believe I would give my patients something I didn't think was safe?"
"I think I'm starting to understand that's not the issue here."
The rest of the way to her laboratory they pass without further conversation, Angela for her part unsure what to make of the comment. If he understands she'd never intentionally put her patients' lives at risk, then does he think her incompetent? Impossible. Aged twenty five she's pioneered, spearheaded, and catapulted the field of nanomedical science and robotics to heights previously only dreamed of. Beyond that, with the work on her synthetic nanomachines she is soon to climb yet greater heights. A single smudge on her operational record is no grounds for reducing anyone's opinion of her capability. She knows Morrison to have made mistakes of his own that got people killed, and never had the impression of him being a petty man. Could it just be politics again?
All such thoughts flee her mind once she crosses the threshold of her lab, because there, in the place of honour at the workbench (for once clear of any and all tools), lies Genji Shimada.
"Your project's a go. Don't screw this up again." Is all the Commander says, before leaving her alone with her patient.
…She really doesn't understand her boss.