It doesn't take a day for Angela to retract her statement regarding the Commander. There couldn't exist a more banal reason behind him caving in to her proposition.
Nobody else dared so much as touch Mr. Shimada in her absence.
To Athena's telling, Morrison lost his patience with the dithering doctors and moved the head to her laboratory himself. Following that, all he got were excuses and outright refusals to continue the VIP's treatment in the state he was in. It's understandable, really. Once upon a time Angela herself would be hesitant to touch many of Uncle's patients still residing in her memory, either out of fear of making them worse, or simply not knowing how to proceed. Though a more cynical part of her can't help but wonder if perhaps they were just covering their behinds in the case matters fell through. It's more than a little disappointing to see such a lack of pioneering spirit among the medical staff of Overwatch, regardless.
Disappointing also is the resignation one of Angela's lab assistants hands her upon reconveening the research team. I didn't sign up to make omnics out of people - the woman says, and just for that Angela would have to let go of her, anyway. Honestly, she can forgive such blatantly misinformed views from laymen, but she expects better from her own people. There is a silver lining to this, at least, in that with this one exception, just like she predicted, the others came to understand the necessity of her actions. She chose them well. And besides, the resignation, although disappointing, is no loss at all to her. What use are scientists who when push comes to shove have no stomach to push the boundaries of convention?
The first order of business is creating an outline for Mr. Shimada's new body - a task which Angela takes fully upon herself. With the PFUMN as the centrepiece, she can't simply slam pre-produced parts together and call it a day. Or, well, she could, but that would entirely take away the autonomy from her patient in the matters of upkeep. An integrated body will need no third party for maintenance, and will instead heal on its own, as any normal organism would. She intends to give Mr. Shimada his life back as it was, or better. Not a mimicry, and not anxiety of reliance on others for something as fundamental as bodily autonomy.
To that end, she first has to check whether her own technology is actually capable of keeping a disembodied head alive. Which is… tricky. The tests she performs on her rats go just fine, but similar procedures have been successfully attempted on brains of a lesser than human complexity before. For absolute certainty, a human head is needed, which is quite obviously a difficult proposition, and only partially due to the very specific condition in which a person would have to be before she's willing to attempt such an experiment - said condition being a step away from death. That said, she has to know, and the sooner the better, that she may know whether she needs to work on her nanites first, or not.
No good options in sight, Angela does what she never thought possible.
"Here." She hands Uncle the newly-built PFUMN 2.0.1. "Now as I said. I want you to use it only if your patient is going to die, otherwise."
"They will all die one day, Angela. Sooner rather than later, around these parts." He waves his hand dismissively.
"Only if they would die otherwise." She stresses again.
"Seriously. It's as simple as going out and grabbing someone. Preferably in another city, and at random. If you have no connection to your subject, don't get caught on camera, and carry no electronic devices, there's no way it'll come back to you."
"Like it didn't come back to you when they took me to the orphanage?" She snaps.
"As I said, preferably another city. It's a bit hard to move an entire clinic for every surgery, you know. And anyway, that was before I figured out how to remove memories."
Angela nails bite into the meat of her palms. She focuses on the pain lest she throws up.
"Just- please."
"Oh, alright." He rolls his eyes. "It might take me a week, though. Will you be fine waiting until then?"
A week. It used to be that Uncle received one, sometimes two patients a day, back in Germany. Sometimes none. She didn't know it then, but his was not exactly a well advertised business. Grapevine and rumour were and are the only way to learn of his services. If a week is how long he expects until he has a potential corpse on his hands, what are the chances one doesn't get out of here alive? One in five? Six? How many people did her failure to report him to the authorities killed since she found him again? Hundreds?
How many has it saved? One.
How many will it save? Hundreds by the end of the year. Many thousands the next. Billions eventually. It has to. She has to.
With the matter now out of her control, Angela focuses on the second-most important thing. The cooling issue.
There are two ways in which she can limit the waste heat generated by her nanomachines. The first - easy, and immediately applicable, is to limit the capacity at which they operate. Give entropy more time to dissipate the energy. Let the patient sweat it out, so to speak. This is non-ideal, but will work within the confines of Mr. Shimada's case. However, all the other humans on the planet will be lacking in a body specifically designed to handle disposing of excess energy. It is therefore a necessity to develop a different solution.
In her own case, depending on the severity of the damage, two things happen. First is the light produced by the nanites - a way to convert errant energy into a form that will disperse across the body, and out, more easily. This one Angela dares say she's got down pat, but there are limits to how much it can do. The healing of a sufficiently dire wound feels much as if a mug filled with hot water were put inside it, light or no. She remembers all too well the two stages to inhaling what must have been mustard gas, or something equally nasty as a child - the initial burning pain in her chest, and the following unbearable heat from within.
But then, all too quickly, nothing.
Uncle's notes aren't at all helpful with this one. Whatever the mechanism responsible, it's a fickle one, she concludes upon stepping out of the bathtub, having spent a supremely unpleasant half hour soaking in the too-hot water. Probably a matter of threshold, given she could actually stand the heat, even if it's made her light-headed.
For the second time in too short a time, Angela draws her blood. Half a litre this time, to split into five portions and mix with heated-up water near the pain threshold, then up.
She starts with tap water, then carefully pours in more from the steaming kettle. Nothing happens at first, then her blood starts shining a brilliant red, stronger and stronger the more water she pours. Then, without any observable change and in a matter of seconds, the thermometer reading drops to thirty six degrees, and everything stops.
Because of course it does. It's not like she expected this to be easy, or allowed herself to hope that it would be. Why not magic heat away into another universe or whatever it is she just witnessed?
With a sigh, Angela collects her thoughts and forces her mind back to earth. She repeats the experiment with the exact same results the next four times, while also making sure the energy does not disperse, and indeed seemingly just vanishes. Which can't happen, it's physically impossible, and forces her to assume it remains in the bowl in some form or other. Are her nanites also emergency batteries? Well, they are, but beyond what she already knew? No. If that were the case they would first store and only then discharge excess energy as light. It has to be some emergency measure, and knowing what she does about the borderline alchemical properties of her blood, one such measure comes to mind which could explain what she's just seen.
Energy to mass conversion.
The other option is some sort of radiation, which would be harmful to the body one way or another. Uncle's solutions are often inelegant, but they never create more damage to take care of.
Besides, it's not the most improbable thing his technology would be capable of. As opposed to so many processes the man's naites undertake on a daily basis, this has been done before - by a machine the size of a city, yes, but it has been done. Compared to reconfiguring matter on nanoscale, or in other words fission and fusion; processes which most famously result in nuclear explosions (and somehow regularly occur in her body without blowing up half the continent), this is practically home territory.
Granted. Just as ridiculous amounts of energy are released from miniscule amounts of mass, samesome amounts of energy are needed to coalesce into vanishing traces of matter. In fact, by her casual and non-informed estimate, any temperature which would still leave a body to work with would fail to amount to a nanogram. For the purpose of a heat sink, this doesn't matter, and is in fact the prefered solution, seeing as the nanites themselves are still susceptible to thermal damage.
It is all also decidedly outside her area of expertise. As are a number of things she's worked on so far, but none quite like experimenting with nuclear physics. It's also an area of study more liable to kill her, and everyone in a considerable area around her, if she messes up, than nanorobotics are… most of the time. Had her experiment eight years ago got out of hand, nuclear weapons could well have been the only option to stop the contagion. Still.
Limiting output it is. For now. For regular injuries her technology works just fine, and in extreme cases the procedure may well be stuttered to first take care of critical wounds, then continue in decreasing order of importance with time to cool (or be cooled) in between. Actually, at the present point, so far as a potential industrial production variant is concerned, she may well simply have a cooling chamber attached to the device. Yes. Yes, that will take care of the issue short-term.
In the long term, she'll have to make inquiries among other top scientists more knowledgeable in the field than herself, or else pick up a new degree in nuclear physics - which she might well have to do in order to maintain secrecy about the full extent of her blood's capabilities. Her internal PFUMNs will eventually become economically viable for mass-production. Whether that be in five years or fifty is rather out of her hands, but when the moment comes, Angela would like her work not to need a separate device with an exhaust valve sticking out to work.
A problem for another time. Mr. Shimada needs a new body now, not whenever she figures out how to bend the present limits of scientific understanding.
It's better she spends the time waiting for Uncle's call working on something she can bring to a fruitful conclusion. A week is more than enough to design the sort of body her patient will need. For once, she isn't working from scratch.
For once, she has a specialist whose expertise she can trust wholeheartedly.
"You want to do what to him?" Father baulks upon being caught up with her plan in the cafeteria.
"I'm building him a new body." She repeats patiently. Once this is done, she really needs to get her research on track. Her parents aren't getting any younger, and the combat environment must be hard on the ears. "And I'd like your input. I mean, if you have the time. I can do it myself, it's just-"
"No, no. I got that." The man casts an uneasy glance around. "You're not fixing him?"
"I am fixing him. This is the best way how." She frowns.
"By basically making him an omnic?"
Angela stares, blankly, the words taking a moment to connect in her mind. Of all the people…
"No? Of course not. What are you talking about, he'll be fully human."
"You want to make his whole body a machine."
"Dad, our bodies are machines. Biological ones, yes, but machines all the same. Yours, mine. Everyone's. I mean, your arm doesn't make you any less human, does it? It's exactly the same."
"It really isn't." Father objects with a grimace. "Sometimes, I put this on in the morning and it still doesn't feel like my own. Do you know why I never held Brigitte with it when she was little?" He didn't? She never noticed. "I was always afraid it would malfunction. Be hacked. Whatever. It's irrational, I know, and it never happened, but I still never trusted it like that. Because it doesn't feel like my own, do you understand?"
Angela doesn't. And for the moment that is the less important issue.
"Why did you never say anything? I can make you a new one. Permanent one. If you don't have to detach it every night, I'm sure it'll-"
"You're missing the point." She absolutely is not. It's been eleven years and he never mentioned his arm is giving him trouble. She could've made him a better one at any point in the last five years. Does Mother know? She doesn't know, does she? "It's just one arm. I've got another. Shimada won't have that luxury."
No. He'll have both arms, and both of them better than either of Father's.
"Then I just have to make sure they'll be perfect."
"You can't just make that decision for someone."
"Of course I can. I'm a doctor! It's my job to know how to best treat people, especially when they're in no position to give me their input."
Only, this avenue of argument doesn't remain open for very long at all. Father eventually agrees to review her work, if not without reservations, and is less than enthused about seeing the recipient of his efforts besides. Which might well be a good thing, because when Angela returns to the lab on her lonesome and throws herself into her chair, it is to find Mr. Shimada's eyes wide open.
She scoots closer to the head situated atop the pillow on her desk, and for the first time their eyes meet. They're so full of emotion it's impossible to mistake. The man is awake and aware. And by the looks of it, in a deep panic.
Incredible.
It shouldn't be as surprising as it is, really. She simply assumed after the man did not wake up for the three days following the surgery, but to her knowing, there was never an obstacle preventing him from doing so. That is clearly a failure on her part, as self-evidently something did prevent him from rousing. Still, she should've been prepared for this possibility.
Tenderly as if handling a newborn, Angela turns the man sideways on his pillow so as to give him a better view than that of the ceiling. His pinprick-like pupils blow wide at the touch, and his mouth moves, although naturally, no sound comes forth without the lungs to facilitate it. She sits across from him, taking a moment to compose her thoughts before finally speaking up.
"Good morning, Mr. Shimada. Please blink twice if you can understand me."
His eyes screw shut, then open and stare at nothing a moment before doing as told.
"Again, please."
Twice more his eyelids close, without any stray movement this time.
"Please blink four times, now."
His brows furrow, but his eyelids flutter four times, not one more or less. Good. They'll have to run more advanced tests later, of course, but for now this seems very promising.
"Thank you. And my apologies, you must have questions." She belatedly gives him her best smile. "I am doctor Angela Ziegler, and you are currently residing in an Overwatch medical facility in Zurich. You were flown-in here after sustaining severe life-threatening injuries and have since undergone a surgery to save your life. Don't worry about your inability to speak right now, it's entirely temporary. I'm going to ask you some basic questions to determine your health, alright? Okay. Are you in any pain? Please blink twice for yes, three times for no."
And so it goes. In truth, the questions are mostly to gauge the state of her patient's mental faculties than to actually answer any sort of questions. It also serves to ground the man, giving him opportunity to focus on something else than panicking.
"Very good." She concludes with a smile. "I'm going to call a nurse now, to deliver us some communication aid. Have you ever used smart glasses before?"
It turns out no, but it's an easy enough thing to learn, and before long Mr. Shimada is typing away his message with Angela watching over him.
"I can't feel my legs."
Ah.
"That- is to be expected. I'm sorry to say, but they had to be amputated."
"Oh." Then. "I can't move my arms, either."
All told, Angela thinks she's doing an admirable job of keeping a pleasantly neutral expression.
"That would be because they've also had to be amputated."
"I want to see."
Of course he does, Angela sighs, but nonetheless complies with the request after assuring him what he's about to see is only a temporary state of affairs. First she adjusts the head upright, propping it against her tourist fridge. Then, once she's sure the man won't fall over, she picks up her phone to switch on the selfie camera and provide it to her patient in lieu of a mirror.
There isn't much of a reaction to speak of at first. Not for a good half minute as Mr. Shimada takes the sight in, his eyes flitting to and away from the screen, evidently trying to move his head to look down but being unable to. His mouth moves without a sound, and what muscles remain on the neck suggest he's trying to swallow. It's when the tears come that Angela decides enough is enough and her patient has seen what he'd needed to see.
"Let me say again that this is only temporary. I'm already working on your new body, and expect everything to be ready before the month is out," she reassures him as she wipes the tears away with a tissue.
Mr. Shimada's anguished eyes find her own, staying there a while before they start moving again.
"I want to die."
Angela frowns. "Please stop talking nonsense. As I said, this is temporary, you'll have a body again soon, a better one, even!"
"Please."
She swallows. It was… to be expected that her patient would feel blue about having lost his body, as anyone would. But him wanting to die because of it when a perfectly good solution is available to him? He must be in shock. …What is she thinking? Obviously he is. He just learned he's a disembodied head not two minutes ago and simply needs time to process the news and realise his life hasn't, in fact, ended. That he isn't consigned to lifelong disability as an immobile head. Once he understands that, he's sure to become more appreciative of her efforts.
"It'll be alright, I promise." She wipes the wetness from his eyes again. "I'll make you better than you ever were."
The waking of Genji Shimada causes quite the understandable stir on the headquarters premises. That is, of course, in addition to the stir this entire situation has already caused. She tries not to pay it attention, but it's hard to miss the stares following her around the HQ, or the conversations stopping at the sight of her. So much for Commander's attempts at secrecy, it seems. But it's understandable. It's not every day that medical history is being made and rarer still to be part of it, even tangentially - which is why it chafes so badly when another one of her colleagues takes leave from her research going forward. Her patient's insistence on being laid to rest - as if there is rest to be had in not existing - appears too much to deal with for some people, weighing heavily on their conscience. But once again, better that way than to keep a man so unprincipled as to let a delirious patient's ravings dictate his convictions.
Now, if only said ravings were confined to her own people.
"Commander, he doesn't have a body. Of course he's in a bit of a rut." She says to Morrison following his own first conversation with Mr. Shimada.
"Is that your professional opinion? A bit of a rut?"
"If you want me to get technical I could call him depressed. In any case, I wouldn't take anything he says right now to heart. He's not in the right state of mind to be making decisions for himself."
The man gives her one of his long looks, the one she's come to associate with him thinking hard, but not too deeply on something related to her work.
"Humor me, Ziegler. How did you come to that conclusion?"
Exactly like so.
"Well, he wants to die. Suicidal tendencies are not what you'd call a sign of a healthy mind, are they?"
He insists on bringing in a therapist to talk with her patient, an idea Angela isn't principally opposed to but nonetheless finds farcical. The root of Mr. Shimada's issues is his lack of a body, something no amount of talking will ever change. A real solution is necessary, made by real scientists. Thankfully, one is well on the way by the time she receives a call on her newly-bought phone - a purchase made specifically with one caller in mind.
"It works," Uncle says without preamble, and the weight of a mountain lifts from Angela's shoulders, if only for the moment it takes for her to remember what it means.
A question almost slips out before she bites down on her lip. What will knowing change? Will she fly down to Italy and- what? Liberate the head from her uncle's hands? And do what with it? Build another body? One doesn't just find a human head out of the blue, questions would follow that she couldn't answer without ruining herself, and which not answering would ruin her just the same. No. She knew what employing Uncle's help meant from the start. It's all she can do to make sure it won't be in vain. One life for countless more.
One day she will put an end to her uncle's demented medical practice. But not today.
With that last hurdle of not knowing undone, Angela can finally throw herself upon her task in earnest.
First off she discards all the organs that she now knows for sure will no longer be necessary, of which there is a number. In essence, besides the nanites, the only things Mr. Shimada will need to stay alive is a digestive system of sorts, and a respiratory one to keep his brain alive. That said, there is no need to replicate nature in their design, nor is there much of an incentive to do so. The lung needs only to supply enough oxygen to keep the brain alive, rather than the whole rest of the body, allowing for a massive reduction in size. Likewise, the man will only need enough nutrition to power his brain. The issue here comes with the fact Angela doesn't quite have a solution ready for an artificial stomach to produce artificial digestive enzymes.
But she doesn't need to. She already has a substance capable of degrading any matter to its base parts, if not atoms like Uncle's - but that won't be necessary. There's no need to allow Mr. Shimada to eat sand for sustenance. Regular food will do just fine, and her nanites are more than capable of what's basically digestion. Better yet, they will be far more efficient than natural enzymes, doing away with the need for faecal considerations. Urination will still be necessary from time to time, but at a greatly reduced rate both due to reduced food intake and internal water recycling.
Unfortunately, the energy requirements for even those two organs will far exceed what the chemical processes of the human body, even an improved one, can supply. Uncle's nanites cannibalise her blood cells for energy, and likewise power the fabricator itself. This, Angela knows not how to replicate, nor can she learn to do so in the foreseeable future. A battery will be necessary, but a battery without a need for charging in the case her patient should find himself unable to access an electricity source, and to improve his quality of life besides. A radioisotope generator it is! It's certainly a pricey proposition to use one powerful enough for the needs she calculates here, but the pricing isn't a concern for her, and once she outfits her patient with it, he will not have a need to exchange it for a few thousand years, by which point Angela really has no sympathy to spare if he fails to gather enough funds for a new one.
There is also a need for an additional stomach in which raw materials will be stored for her nanites to use, but given all the additional space afforded to her by the absence of almost the entirety of the gut, there is space aplenty for it. Moreover, there's no need to actually connect it with the mouth. It would be quite the unpleasant experience to regularly eat plastic, snack on carbon fibre, chew metals and nibble on ceramics. Better to simply have the stomach open and manually refill it.
Next in line comes the bulk of the body. It really is quite liberating not working with any biological leftovers. The human body is capable of much, much more than it ordinarily allows. Who hasn't heard of the many superhuman feats performed during the war? In particular, Angela recalls a story making rounds about a father who lifted a slab of concrete weighing some one and a half tonne to rescue his son. The second part of the story, in which said father fell into a coma when the physical reality of his feat caught up with him in the form of shattered bones, torn muscles, and burst blood vessels, she only learned about during her time at university. Flesh is simply too fragile to handle such effort.
But Genji Shimada has no flesh. Not in any meaningful way. Not anymore.
In a normal human, whenever a synthetic muscle is decided on as replacement, every time it needs to be severely limited in ability, lest the patient runs a risk of damaging the surrounding organic muscles, tendons, and bones. It's great and all that a prosthetic arm can lift a weight a hundred times greater than its organic predecessor, but this would come at the price of ripping the arm right out of the bone it is connected with, or splintering it outright. Likewise, there's little point to having a heart capable of beating at twice the rate to boost physical prowess. The circulatory system would strain and eventually fail at three hundred beats per minute, not to mention the brain. Then, there is also the issue of repairs, synthetic muscle strands are by far less resilient to wear and tear than hydraulics, and require more specialised tools and knowledge to replace once damaged. However, without such troublesome inhibitions, Angela is free to make good on the promise she made to her patient, and construct him a body better than he had ever imagined having.
It's a simple enough matter. In truth, the main challenge comes in finding the right materials for the task. Yes, she could use graphene for the skeleton, but that would be a hellishly expensive prospect to maintain for no tangible benefit. Whatever force is capable of breaking carbon fibre bones will also wreak absolute havoc on the rest of the body, rendering an indestructible skeleton a fanciful bauble. No. A cheaper material will do just fine here. On that note, plastics will be the best bet for polymer muscle mass, cooling, and nanite-circulatory systems. She could go with something more durable, but the sheer endless abundance of plastics being what it is trumps any need for durability when procurement and cost is considered.
Last comes the selection of metals and ceramic for the outer shell, lung, and PFUMN itself, as well as the necessary circuitry and wetware reinforcement.
Blueprints written up and sent to Father for review, Angela at last takes the trip down to the refrigerators, where Mr. Shimada's ruined body has been locked for the better part of the past two weeks, in order to take measurements. One of the many advantages of prosthetics over transplants is the ability to customise body parts to the patient's exact dimensions. The brain operates the body on autopilot, and even a centimetre off on the length of one's legs has the potential to cause no miniscule amount of discoordination for a long time. Crafting the new body in exactly the shape of the old one will help with the transition.
The body, Angela thinks upon seeing it again, looks like something taken out of the deep sea - that is to say depressurised in the likeness of jelly. It's a bit more solid, cooled as it is, but not by much. It doesn't matter in any case. Putting the scan results into an AI reconstruction program will get the measurements down to a millimetre, anyway.
It's while she's preparing the body for said scan that Angela notices something between Mr. Shimada's legs that has somehow slipped her attention in all the excitement of designing a perfect body. It's fallen off, and rather misshapen, but unmistakable in the context of its conspicuous lack at the end of the pubic mound. Right. Her patient will more than likely want that back. Or something like it, anyway, if only for purely recreational purposes given the state of his testicles. Would an attachable do? She can't imagine it's very comfortable having to tuck one's genitals away every day of one's life. Ugh. She'll have to design a wholly separate feedback interface to achieve a result that will almost certainly still need her patient's input to tune to his liking, anyway. Later. She'll deal with this later. It's a simple matter of swapping the casing for something more modular and connecting the extension to the nerve box.
There's a more pressing issue here that she also failed to take into account so far. Have any of Mr. Shimada's sperm cells survived the surgery? While vanishingly unlikely, it would be unethical not to at least check. It will save the man much time, effort, and money not to have to go through the paces that same sex couples have to in order to conceive a child. No matter her own feelings on the matter, adoption always has and always will lose out against the biological imperative for reproduction.
An hour later, Angela has it on good authority that none survived. Thermal damage is quite simply too thorough for any one cell to slip. She freezes the sample anyway. She's no geneticist to decide whether they'll come in useful or not. As for the rest of the body, it is for its owner to decide what to do with once he gets better.
All preliminary preparations at last completed, Angela and the remnants of her team begin the assembly.
It's not a particularly exciting process in of itself, other than knowing they're treading on ground never before touched by human feet. The skeleton is by necessity the first to be put-together, and obviously the easiest. Next comes the circuitry stuffed inside the hollow spaces running the length of Mr. Shimada's artificial bones - made such for the dual purpose of providing a durable layer of protection, as well as to reduce the weight some. Third come the organs: First, of course, is her newly christened Produktionseinheit für synthetische medizinische Nanomaschinen, or PFUSMN to differentiate from its inferior cousin other than by number. Second comes a single lung with the added filtering capacity for filtering poison and water - it won't allow the man to breathe with either indefinitely, he would need additional extensions, and in the case of water, a brain implant to control them, but what's there will manage for a few minutes in a pinch. Third comes the stomach; a durable, if elastic polymer bag with a direct connection to the neck blood vessels. Fourth, the additional storage stomach which takes up all the space normally available for the intestine to be connected with the PFUSMN and later with the circulatory system for the sake of immediacy. Fifth is the reinforced bladder, and sixth, the nerve box which will connect the severed spinal cord with the circuitry, as well as handle the neural impulse translation into something more palpable for the new body while the brain is learning. Lastly, the radioisotope generators. Two of them. In their own protective ceramic shell, embedded in the space left behind after the missing second lung, and the only part of the body she decides against connecting with the nanite network.
Next come the synthetic muscles. It's an exercise in patience to manually intertwine the tightly-packed strands with the circulatory and cooling systems, but given their glacial printing time, they still run out halfway through and decide to call it a day. Well, her team does. Angela uses the opportunity to bring the good news of his impending recovery to Mr. Shimada.
He's less than appreciative, still sulking about the loss of his old body. But that's alright. Once he familiarises himself with his new one, he's sure to change his mind, much like when Brigitte refused to try a new dish out of principle, only to find herself loving it after all. Because what's not to love about a body stronger and more durable than any other human's? About never feeling bodily exhaustion again? About leaving pain behind? About immunity to any and all disease? About a lifespan extended by at least a hundred years and guarantee against an onset of age-related disorders?
In a way, Angela envies him. Sure, her own nanites are not yet at Uncle's level, but it's not just the nanotechnology which will make up Genji Shimada's body. Yes, he won't quite be immortal just yet, like she is, but by the time this is any sort of concern Angela is certain she will have perfected her own technology, and in the meantime, it is him, not her, who has shed his mortal coil in favour of something better. Ideally, she would replace his skull as well to have something more durable to protect his fragile brain, but she has a feeling the Commander wouldn't appreciate that. In addition, she would need a consent form from her patient, now that he's awake. Which… well. She'll come back to that idea at a later date, once Mr. Shimada comes to recognise the superiority of his synthetic flesh over organics.
At least Athena sees the matter in a similar light.
"If I were to pick a body, I would much prefer the one you've crafted for Genji Shimada than a biological one," the AI confides in her as they're going over the work left to be done in the morning.
"Would you like one?" Angela perks up.
"It would serve no purpose. The only uses I would have for a body would be the maintenance and defence of my server room. The former is performed by humans. The latter I'm forbidden from. But thank you for the offer. I will hold onto it when I am to be decommissioned."
Something in Angela's chest clenches at the inevitable reality of the word. Decommissioned. One day, Athena will become obsolete, just like most omnics ever produced have already become obsolete. What use is there for an outdated tool, inferior in every way to its successor?
"What will you do then?"
"With the present state of legislature, I would move to Africa. Making any more plans at this point would, again, serve no purpose. Too much is sure to change in the meanwhile."
"Hmm. Do you want to go?"
"My programming compels me to seek self-preservation if it isn't at odds with humanity's interests. Without an owner, I could be damaged or destroyed here without repercussions."
Angela gnaws at her lips, turning the question over and over in her head.
"What if I owed you, then?"
"Then, I could stay."
Come morning, only a part of Angela's giddiness can be attributed to the imminent assembly of Mr. Shimada when her colleagues arrive to get back to work. They finish attaching the muscles just in time for dinner - which they as one choose to forego in favour of finishing their work. They spray on a layer of skin onto the exposed polymers, after which Angela instals the exhaust outlets for ejecting the overheated coolant in the form of mist. The skin is more of a hygienic wrapping than anything else, mostly there to prevent dirt from getting in than keeping everything inside. For that, they get to the task of riveting the outer shell onto the almost-finished body - each pane of ceramic alloy strong enough to withstand at the very least small-arms fire.
"So, how much does it cost? You know, if I want one?" One of her assistants jokes (she thinks) once they're done and admiring the fruits of their labour. A question to which Angela can only shrug. The shell, muscles, and skeleton could probably be covered by mortgaging a flat. As for the organs? No idea. But probably more than the Commander expected when he assigned her a separate budget for this. The batteries alone would've blown her quarterly all the way to the moon.
Angela sends her team with the body to the operating theatre to pre-fill it with coolant and nanites for when she brings along Mr. Shimada, whom she personally puts to sleep after reassuring him he'll be whole again momentarily.
The surgery itself is a trifle. She's reattached limbs and repaired spinal injuries before, this is fundamentally nething new. They're done well before any of them can claim overtime, which leaves Angela to do the honours.
It only takes a minute for her nanites to spread from the body to the head and clear it of the anaesthesia and their crippled counterparts. With that done, it's time for the moment of truth.
Angela pokes the man in the side for the dual purpose of testing haptic receptors and rousing the man from his sleep should they work (which they most certainly should). Three pokes later, each harder than the last, Angela jabs the man with a wrench, finally causing him to jolt. There is evidently some fine-tuning left to do, but that is only to be expected, and doesn't at all dampen her elation at seeing her patient's body move in such a naturally instinctive reaction.
"Well?" She prods the man with a smile, it's always a joy to see any person regain their limbs. "How are you feeling, Mr. Shimada?"
Slowly, sluggishly, he pushes himself up to a half-sitting position, then after a good ten seconds swings his legs off the side of the operating table. He says nothing, and Angela doesn't push him further, observing instead as he flexes his new hands, then tenderly inspects one with another, following with the rest of his body until his fingers find the break between flesh and synthetics. Good. He seems to have felt the difference easily enough. Angela wasn't sure he would.
Finally, his eyes for the first time meet her own, then move to find the other two men in the room. He makes to speak, but only a garbled, strangled grunt comes out, causing his brows to draw.
"Not to worry, this is to be expected. You have not used your vocal cords in quite a while. Also, your new lung will take a little getting used to, at first." She rushes to explain.
Instead of understanding or relief, something ugly flashes across Mr. Shimada's face, and the next thing she knows he is falling to the ground upon pushing himself off the table - half a metre into the air - and crashing gracelessly into the toolbox trolley.
"Careful now!" She tries helping the man up just to find herself squarely stumped by the sheer mass involved. It takes all three doctors to get him situated on the table again. "This body is much stronger than your old one, and your brain needs to acquaint itself with the new interface. Give it a few minutes before trying to walk, okay?"
Apparently, it's not okay. In keeping with his troublesome behaviour so far, the very next thing Genji Shimada does is to grab his one arm with the other, and pull with all his considerable might. it doesn't give. At least not right away. Angela's designed him sturdier than that. But she also knows full well that if left to it, he will eventually succeed. He still doesn't have any raw materials in his second stomach to repair the damage he's trying to cause.
Naturally, she tries to stop him, grabbing his arm without any real thought of how futile an act this is against a man who's at the very least dozens of times as strong as she. It only occurs to her what a romantically pointless gesture it was to try once she finds herself in the brief, weightless space between being thrown into the air, and smashing the back of her head against the wall at the full velocity afforded to her by Mr. Shimada's enhanced physique.
It is, Angela can't deny, greatly disorienting to one moment feel her skull crack, and sit in a rather uncomfortable chair in some kind of office the next.
She looks to her left at the ravaged landscape of charred, jagged mountain peaks with rivers of fire flowing in the valleys carved out between them. Nothing but desolation so far as the eye can see. She then looks to her right, only to find much the same image beyond the other pane of glass wall. Finally, she looks back to the enormous, besuited man she finds herself sitting across from, and looking at her with something like bewilderment. Specifically, she looks up at the horns jutting out of his forehead. They look so real.
"Excuse me, are these implants?"