Angela's first volunteer, one Vivian Chase, is something of a marvel to behold.
"May I?" She catches herself the last moment before tracing the seams of the woman's hand.
"Liao should still have the designs stashed somewhere." The reply is terse, but Ms. Chase nonetheless extends her arm to satisfy Angela's curiosity.
Whether or not she could get her hands on the blueprints is of little consequence. It's easy to tell at a glance Liao's work is not something she'd like to reproduce. Too many moving parts so very obviously designed for the task with too little consideration spared for the quality of the patient's life. Exposed pistons and joints must be hell to keep. Robust, military grade alloys make for great tools, but not very comfortable limbs. And still, a pinnacle of body enhancement even a year prior; inferior to Mr. Shimada's in every way but durability.
"While I would be glad to have you as a volunteer, I believe there's a better option for you, specifically." She releases the woman's hand to pick up a tablet.
"You mean your heart implant?"
"Well, it's not an implant so much as a replacement. But given you already have one of those…" she trails off while scrolling through the files. "Here. Take a look."
"Uh, weren't we talking about a new heart?"
"Yes, but, while simply swapping your heart for a PFUSMN would do the job and preserve your brain in the event of injury, you would be missing out on all the other benefits of having one. Which, seeing as your body is already mostly cybernetic, would be considerable. For example, I can't imagine it's very convenient to maintain all of this" She motions broadly at Ms. Chase's body. "-not to mention the internals. With compatible replacements, you would only need to load up on raw materials and the unit would take care of the rest, it even has a self-repair function. All that in addition to instantaneous field repairs, immunity to poison, disease and viruses of biological and cybernetic origin, considerably cutting your body weight down, and unexposed joints!" She concludes the ad-hoc pitch with a nod and a smile, having counted off the listed improvements on her fingers.
Angela can barely contain her full-body shivers an hour later when she and Ms. Vivian shake hands after hammering out the broad strokes of a plan for the woman's new and improved body. It's refreshing to speak with someone so open to her suggestions for a change, even if the soldier chooses to keep the flesh shell of her torso, stomach, and intestine - the last three biological pieces of her below the neck. Sentiment, she shrugs, and Angela supposes she can accept the honest admission of emotional attachment over the hollow purist tirades. It's a shame about losing her first serum volunteer, but it would be remiss of her, not to mention unethical, to not present a patient with superior choices.
Thankfully, she need not feel despondent about that for long.
They're not many, but in the absence of any it certainly feels like rush hours when over the next couple of week a few dozen men and women volunteer for a chance to live after dying (or else contribute their bodies to science, as her contracts are explicitly required to state in bold print). Notably, just over a half are already in some way enhanced, biologically and otherwise, by unfortunate circumstance and choice both. As far as military organisations go, Overwatch may harbour a disproportionately large number of individuals such as these, but still they make for no more than twenty percent of the total personnel, leaving Angela to wonder whether she should perhaps aim her advances specifically towards this group in her future searches for test subjects. True, there are outliers like Father, who still stubbornly refuses to let her build him a new arm, but the correlation is undeniable.
As is the timing. For so many to finally sign up only after a disaster is rather conspicuous to say the least, but Angela won't fault anyone for that. Whatever their reasons, these agents have entrusted Angela with their futures, or at least their bodies. High-minded or not, for the future of humanity or just their own, their intentions matter little in the end. Besides which, simply wanting to live, and taking a chance to do so, is not in any way untoward. Were their positions reversed, Angela would most certainly hope their tech to be working.
It's too bad the chances to test this hope come so few and far between.
That is of course not to say she hopes her volunteers die just so she can carry on with her work, not at all! She's known from the outset this would be no quick matter. Barring utter disasters like Lombardy, Overwatch averages only a few deaths a year, so while certainly an occupational hazard, joining the Strike Force only slightly lowers one's life expectancy. No, what bothers her is that when agents do die, none of them are her own.
Which is frustrating on multiple levels, none more so than because they could've signed up for her trials and not only have a chance to come back to life, or failing that, give someone else in the future a better chance by providing Angela with valuable knowledge. What she has to deal with instead is a bunch of purist nonsense. As if these were the Dark Ages and her technology some soul-corrupting magic. It's incomprehensible. She could already be conducting her trials. Instead, she has to wait.
That is not to say her wait is idle. It takes months, but absent of urgent need, the legal proceedings, and worse, aligning Ms. Vivian's timetable to allow her some familiarity with her new body before she's deployed again, simply take that much more time than an emergency response. Come the long-awaited day, everything goes smoothly as can be. The surgery takes closer to three hours than three days it took to complete Mr. Shimada. Advances she's since made with the PFUSMN aside, her new patient does not need fixing up, only unsheathing, replacement, and reconnecting the brain with its various old and new dependencies. The Commander doesn't even have the chance to tire of standing in his corner of the room.
Better yet, in the following weeks, Angela gets a number of requests for prosthetics' replacement. None as extensive as Ms. Vivian's, usually just a leg or a forearm, and none quite as good as hers on account of not also replacing the entire skeleton, but satisfying nonetheless, in polar opposition to her stagnating nanomachine research.
Throughout, she continues to take care of the wounded alongside her new field team. This, on a few occasions, includes her volunteers, none ever too seriously wounded - a fact which leaves Angela quite conflicted with her frustration. She doesn't wish them ill, she's not her uncle. Still, divorced of everything, it would be nice for one of them to finally fulfil her criteria.
Only, when it does finally happen, she can do nothing. Her volunteer, one Ms. Simon is cut off from the rest of her team and unable to be extracted until way past the window of opportunity. Angela doesn't even learn about it until she sees the body bag at the end of the day, way in the back, having spent hours uselessly sitting around.
A different approach is necessary.
"Denied." The Commander gives his answer once she's concluded her request.
"...May I ask why?" Angela belatedly ventures, thrown off by the uncompromising answer. Normally, the man will leave her a figurative window open, somewhere on the second floor or thereabouts, through which to climb her way in and change his mind.
"I'm not going to risk an asset like you any more than I already am, Ziegler."
Risk?
"Commander, I am perhaps the person least at risk of dying out of all five billion of us. It's not a risk for me to care for the wounded on the battlefield."
"Which is the only reason I haven't pulled you from the field already. Because frankly? It was a mistake on my part to let you go there in the first place with what I knew at the time. Any doctor can do what you do in the field. How many can continue your research in the event of your death?"
"A very unlikely event."
"Be that as it may, you bring nothing to the field that another person can't do. Less, actually."
"Less?" Angela bristles.
"Supposing you got to Simon in time, then what? What's your plan? Give her your serum and wait for extraction? Alone? Carry her out of there on your back and hope to God you're not both gunned down? Could you even carry her? What about a full grown man in full gear? What about the rest of your team? Would you leave them behind for your volunteer? What if something happened to them? How would you get to them? Would you have left Simon? This isn't how we do things out there, Ziegler. There's more to consider than your experiments."
Mortifyingly, Angela can feel her face growing hotter the longer the man speaks. It's true she did not particularly concern herself with the after of delivering her serum, and that's on her, but other than that she deserves none of this. No, she did not have the best results of all the cadets, not where sheer strength was concerned, but she made up for it in endurance and finished boot camp fair and square.
"It's a question of capability, then?"
"It's a question of resource allocation. What can you do in the field that nobody else can? As far as I'm concerned, if you can only do as much as the next medic, it's just not worth the risk, no matter how small. Death isn't the only, or the worst thing that could happen to you."
On that latest point Angela simply must disagree. Death is the only hurdle one can't come back from. Once, perhaps, before medical technology has surged in these last fifty years, when paralysis couldn't be treated. When Alzheimer's could not be stopped, and debilitating, chronic pains truly were chronic. Not anymore.
All the same, the Commander does make one decent enough point that she can't really argue with. Sheis valuable, and more so in the lab than the field. But aside from that (and truthfully more importantly) who Morrison accepts for the team is, ultimately, his prerogative, making it his game they're playing. What can she bring to the fore that none other can? For that matter, how can she compensate for her underdeveloped body if it bothers him so much? She can't just wait another five years before it is finally, finally up to speed.
"...Supposing I could offset my- shortcomings," she continues at length. "Would I be able to join the Strike Force, then?"
Morrison's eyes narrow in a way she's become only too familiar with.
"Out of curiosity, did you talk this over with Torbjorn?"
When she leaves the office a minute later, Angela doesn't quite have a plan right then and there. A vague idea, perhaps. One that will only sprout come the dead of the night with her mind still firmly stuck in Morrison's office.
The most obvious solution, one she's most partial to, consists of creating a completely new body for herself to match her needs. This, however, runs into a problem in that her own technology does not yet guarantee her survival in the way Uncle's does. Yes, she would be exponentially more difficult to harm in the first place, but were that achieved, she would find herself in some dire straits indeed. For example, if she were shot down again, and so happened to fail in acquiring a parachute (again), the damage to her brain could be catastrophic to the point of irrecoverability. She must first complete the very branch of her research that she needs a new body for to make shedding her flesh safe.
Plus, there's the matter of her age. Seeing as she's not had the opportunity to test yet, and is unlikely to manage that for a long time to come, there's no saying what would happen to her brain were she to discard her biological body before both are fully formed. Her mice, at least, behave strangely enough to warrant caution once subjected to the idea. Their complete unwillingness to reproduce does not concern Angela overmuch given her own disposition (even if it does make her wonder), but their unceasing attempts to seek out their mother's milk as long as a month after birth, resulting in said mother's bloody demise, do rather put her off the idea of taking the risk.
In a decade, minus a year or two, hopefully. For now, she will keep her birth body.
Partial enhancement would then be the order of the day, but a cumbersome one. Her arms and legs would need to go, shoulders and hips deep. Which would itself require exchanging her bones for something more liable to withstand the strain of synthetic muscle, as well as the weight she would presumably be dealing with on the battlefield - meaning, in effect, replacing her entire skeleton. On its own, that is no great issue, but to Angela's unending chagrin, she is still growing, and replacing all her bones every year or so does not much sound like an enviable prospect. It is one thing to start a few vertebrae short of a full spine to add later on - but she doesn't even know what to do with the pelvis. In the end, simply changing everything would actually be much less time consuming. If all else fails, she supposes.
Else, she could also use more standard cybernetic limbs, much like Ms. Vivian used to. Those could be sufficient, she thinks, even if they would be vastly inferior to her own work. Only, putting the matter of their obsolescence aside, there remains an issue of optics. Angela has no wish whatsoever to deal with the inevitable questions and doubts arising from her outfitting others with her own tech while refusing to do so herself.
Uncle could…
No.
Might she be looking at this from the wrong angle?
After all, she doesn't need an all around solution to every problem she might ever run into. She will not be there to fight, and so need not possess the capacity for it. All she needs is to be more than any other medic. To bring something to the table that none other can. To that end, perfecting her body would be ideal, yes, but isn't actually necessary. Her skin need not shrug off bullets, that's what body armour is for. She doesn't require additional strength even if that is what she's lacking, just the mobility it would afford her to easily carry the injured. And then some, to convince the Commander.
An external device, then. Overwatch allows a great manner of diversity in what their agents use in the field, so that should pose no problem. An exosuit, perhaps? Those things suck up power like a black hole, she'd need a proper portable reactor like in crusader regalia with all the excessive bulk it entails. She wants a suit not a suit of armour. Scale down again? What else? A jetpack?
A jetpack could work.
Or rather, if she endeavoured to be precise in her wording, a propulsion system, and not just any one at that. A regular jetpack available for civilian use, one almost as large as herself - would be worse than useless. It would put her in the air, certainly, but if there's any insight to be found in the videos she peruses, this would mean no more and no less than becoming a near to static target with how unmaneuverable these things appear mid-flight (and presumably ground-side, too).
Military issue, then. One of those raptora suits would fit her needs precisely. Designed from the get-go for the battlefield, the system addresses most of the issues Angela finds with regular jetpacks. They're more powerful. More agile. More robust. There's even a good chance she can acquire the blueprints through internal Overwatch channels, seeing as the UN already employs them with some of their other military branches.
Granted, she couldn't simply build one for herself as is. Changing the size to fit her own would throw the whole system into disarray much like downsizing her nanites any further would break them. And resize it she would have to, if only so it won't cause her to fall over every time she tries standing straight, but also to let her access indoors without needing to dismount, all that after accounting for an additional adult body mass. Luckily, if there ever lived an expert in miniaturisation, she is it.
She wonders, idly, whether she could fit such a system inside a synthetic body.
To an extent, for sure. She could almost certainly fit the engines into limbs at the expense of upscaling them up some. The problem with this comes in the form of excessive heating. Making a harness out of the torso to mount the jets on would be more sensible, at least until she figures out energy to matter conversion to shunt said excess off. Still, she could probably make it work with specialised materials; air intakes at the joints, exhausts on extremities. However, it seems rather impractical, now that she's envisioned the shape of it. The feet need not necessarily be free during flight, but the hands very much must, and such a solution would need both the pairs for steering.
Honestly, wings would probably work better.
The thought gives Angela a pause. It would be easy to mount wings on a body. Any body. Synthetic and biological both.
Now, obviously, these couldn't just be any regular wings. The human shape is no way whatsoever conductive for flight. All the depictions of angels throughout the ages have as one failed to properly depict anything even vaguely capable of flight. For one, mammal bodies are much denser than bird ones, and would therefore require a greater wingspan relative to body size, which for humans in particular would mean an absolutely massive wing size. Not to mention how placing such gigantic wings on a human's back would result in them breaking in the first few flaps under their own weight. For humans to achieve flight without damaging themselves, they, much like every other species with the common amniote ancestor that went on to evolve wings, would have to give up their arms in their present form - and likely their general shape as a whole. The easiest way to go about this, she imagines, would be to go the way of the bat, with a membrane stretching from the waist or even further below all the way up to the wrists. Even so, given the sheer size said wings would extend to, the prospect would prove decidedly impractical, to put it mildly.
Luckily, as opposed to the entirety of the natural world, humans need not abide by nature's design to achieve the same ends. Better ends, even!
She just needs a little bit of help with the means.
"So." Father speaks up at last after a few minutes of paging through the folder Angela's brought to his quarters along with her supper. "You're going through with this after all."
"I meant it when I said I would augment myself eventually, you know."
"No, I- That too, but I meant this whole Strike Team business. Jack told me."
Angela contains her grimace to the corner of her lips. She supposes it's the Commander's right to consult with other Overwatch members about their prospective teammates, but it chafes all the same he would go to Father, specifically. Despite her appearances, she's an adult, and retains the right to introduce the news to her family at such a time she deems fit.
"...I was going to tell you." The words come out weak, too much like a question. "I just- I wasn't even sure what that would mean for me until this."
"Didn't you say you don't want to be military?" Father, thankfully, sounds more confused than appalled, although there's some of the latter apparent in his face, too.
"I don't really." She admits, stirring ketchup together with mayonnaise on her plate with a fry. She knows her place in life and it's not the battlefield. "But I realised I need to be on ground zero if I'm going to get anywhere with my research sometime this decade."
"Then can't you, you know, wait?" Father's grouses with a pained expression.
She could. She can always wait. She can take as much time as she needs. With anything. With everything.
"You're not getting any younger, Dad."
It is altogether easier to bring Father around to her idea than Angela expected. To joining the Strike Force in the capacity of a combat medic, that is, rather than to the wings. It makes an unfortunate sort of sense given his continued resistance to the idea of exchanging his detachable arm for something more permanent. Plus, she has already proven her ability to survive through circumstances no human could reasonably expect to survive. Having that in her corner must surely be of help. In contrast, the man presents her with what must constitute every conceivable solution to her dilemma under the sun and beyond that does not require body modification. Jets, suits, exoskeletons, even mechs, and indeed, wings - only ones mounted onto a suit of armour, not dissimilar from raptor units, rather than her own back.
She dismisses them all, if not out of hand. None of them are bad ideas, not at all! Father is a brilliant engineer, and whatever solution he comes up with, Angela has full confidence would perform to excellence. However, when it comes down to it, the matter really is quite a bit more simple.
Why?
"Because I want them." She answers the question when it is first posed by Father, and then again when, on the man's insistence, she breaks the news to Mother the next she can do so in person - which she supposes is fair, given it was he who did the honours the last time.
Ultimately, when faced with choices each addressing the same issue, one must simply decide which suits them best, personally. And Angela is unashamed to admit there's something (everything) about the prospect of flight, anywhere, at any time, that she takes a fancy to. How long have humans dreamt this ancient dream? Since the very first time they laid eyes on a bird, up in the sky? Here she is, with the means to make it reality beyond just strapping an engine to her back. Here she is, about to add upon the human design in a way no other has done before her. To go beyond simply replacing an inferior part for something better. To go where no human, not even Uncle, has gone before.
How could anything less ever hope to compare?
"I just- worry." Mother frets.
"What about?" A confused laugh slips past Angela's lips. Surely it can't be a lack of confidence in her daughter's and husband's ability. She married one genius and raised another. Together, they are sure to create a wonder.
"About how people will react to this. To you. It's one thing to have a limb or few replaced, but- this goes beyond that. You're talking about changing, really changing yourself."
Changing her body. Which is rather the point. Of course she could design a simple flight system in the winged shape, but that would then account to simply the latest form of yet another propulsion backpack. Something wholly inferior to what Angela has in mind. Angels don't tear off their wings upon touching ground, and following her namesake, neither will she. Morrison wants something impressive and she will give him no less. Anyone can strap themselves inside a suit, but with this she will provide something no-one else can. At least, not without partaking in a very invasive surgery - in mind more than body. What she's determined to become, nothing less will accommodate.
In the end, the project ends up a work of collaborative effort not just between herself and Father, but Mother as well. Angela largely leaves the mechanical parts to her parents, focusing on the bodily integration instead. Oh, she could doubtless manage on her own, but between the three of them, there's no question Father is the better engineer, and his chosen means - hardlight - is not something she ever worked with before. Better he take care of it rather than she, when the result of failure carries the potential velocity of a kilometre-long drop.
The Valkyrie Flugsystem - as Angela settles on naming their creation - takes its shape over a few weeks of bouncing ideas back and forth between herself and her parents. It feels good, refreshing, to work on something that isn't her nanites for a change, and doubly so for its nostalgic nature. She's not had the chance to work with her family in a long time. Not since joining Overwatch really, when their expertise became drastically less useful in her chosen field of study. That in addition to gaining a leadership role in her own research team, and then Athena, to boot. This effort, however, is a private project entirely. Angela would rather not distract her people from their main goal with any side initiatives, even if they would be far more receptive to some of the necessities involved - such as replacing her spine to find space for the implant and the nuclear battery powering it. Even with this measure the device will poke through Angela's skin, as it must, to allow her wings - hardlight propulsors in actuality - to project without tearing her back open each time.
Designing and building the piece, however, are the easiest parts of the process; not simple, but not anything revolutionary in their own right. Were she designing a regular flight system, this would be almost the end of it, with the only thing left to do being wholesale lifting of the control scheme from a raptora suit.
Coding a neural interface for what are in effect additional limbs to interact with her brain? A bit more tricky.
A fair bit more exhilarating, too. For here she is, crafting the framework upon which to transcend the earthbound reality of the human condition. The Daedalus of her time.
She's done similar work before in coding prosthetics, but only ever for what was meant to be there in the first place. It is easy enough for the human brain to adapt wires in the place of nerves; the right connections are all there, the brain structures for operating them ready to resume their work given half the opportunity. The challenge here stems from the complete lack of any such connections and structures. In a very literal sense there is nothing in existence like what she aims to become. Not one winged mammal or bird with wings apart from its four-limbed framework. The thought of creating one, of being the first, follows Angela's every waking moment, and then her dreams, too. For that to happen, however, she needs to design an additional bit of circuitry to add onto her brain.
Fortunately, this has enough to do with the usual process that Angela isn't left completely at a loss. She's been steeped in neuroscience for the better part of the year, and knows well enough how to use a brain sim for calibrating prosthetics. Calibrating said brain through the addition of her chip is not that far off the mark. Still, as ever, it would be much easier and much faster to work with proper, immediate feedback of a test subject.
Lucky her, Angela need not procure a consent form to participate in her own research.
Finding a trusted and willing surgeon to implant her with an experimental piece of technology is a decidedly less straightforward matter. More specifically, finding one who would be able to work with her nanites instead of against them. It pretty much limits her pool of available choices to exactly two people, one of whom will find herself temporarily paralysed for the duration of said procedure. She could, if push comes to shove, ask help of Moira. In theory, it should be enough to add the implant to the blueprint of her body stored in the nanite network memory.
In theory.
Angela has had great many theories regarding Uncle's work over the years, and rarely found them correct.
"Wings, dear?" Uncle doesn't at all try to hide his amusement as he looks over the blueprints she's brought him. "A bit on the nose, don't you think?"
"Yes. Wings." She likewise doesn't try to hide her annoyance. If she got to choose her own name, it wouldn't be Ziegler. "Will you help me or not?"
His smile might well be the most hideous thing Angela's ever seen.
"What is family for?"
She doesn't tell her parents when the day of her surgery comes. They would undoubtedly insist on coming with, which is obviously off the table. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission, is how she believes the old saying goes. They'll be upset with her, yes, but it will be nothing on the order of what would happen if they found out she's not only found her uncle and told nobody, not only stayed in contact with him after, but now also decided to put her life in his hands once again. She can play out the argument in her head easily enough:
She can't trust him, they'd say. He's a madman. They'd say. And though they would be right on both accounts, they also don't know Uncle like she does. Would she trust him to implant her with one of his own creations again? No. The fact she's alive today rather than a pile of cancerous tumours is a stroke of luck she will not put to test. What she can trust him with is to be curious about her new invention at least to the point he'd like to see if it's working. So, one weekend, instead of Stockholm, she grabs the flight for Toledo - where the man recently moved.
The procedure itself is largely unremarkable, other than Angela staying awake, if insensate, for the length of it. It's her own idea; chiefly for the purpose of supervising Uncle to what extent she can while he works, but also to provide advice if needed. Which it isn't. The implantation goes as smoothly as she possibly could wish, leaving her regretting the choice for the many stories Uncle shares with her regarding his latest exploits.
"That should do it, I think." Angela hears, rather than feels, the accompanying wet slap on her back. "Shall we?"
She doesn't scream when her nerves snap back into place, the pain is too phenomenal to find her voice for the few seconds it lasts while her nanites - modified by their creator to account for and accept the mass of foreign material in her body - repair the trauma of surgery. How long it takes her to move, she can't say, unhearing and unseeing for much of it.
None of it matters. As the pain recedes, a new sensation slowly makes itself known. Something alien. Something wrong. Something there, but something not. Something no human has ever felt before her.
It's incredible.
Unfurling her wings for the first time is a less transcendent experience in comparison, made so largely by the need for external software. Even so, the moment they spring to life is not one she will ever forget. Lighter than feathers, they materialise just waysides of her new spine in a flash of scarlet light - a choice made to complement the light of her nanites, but also the Red Cross and Crescent. If her wings must shine, as all hardlight does, then it may as well serve a purpose. Once her work on them is done, they will curve and bend at will, much like natural wings do, but for the moment, each of the fourteen blades stands ramrod straight, taking up nearly all the space of Uncle's kitchen, effectively rooting Angela in place until they're disabled.
It takes time to adjust, after. Her limbs grow numb and her movement stiff. At times, her whole body will seize up for a spell, as if made of stone - an unfortunate, but perfectly natural response on the part of her brain to the unfamiliar wires running the length of her back. Eventually, it will pass. Eventually, the wrongness of her muscles pushing against the new organ will pass into mundane, same as the sight of it against the silvery expanse of her back. Her skin, at least, does not require any getting used to. It isn't skin.
The worst of all is the absence. The phantom limbs not yet there. Angela loses the exact count of how many times she will suddenly feel like falling. Of how her brain scrambles when faced with a door frame her gut insists she won't fit through anymore. Or of how she will turn just a little bit too quickly, and the weight not there force her to abruptly throw herself against the nearest thing she can grab onto. The flight back to Zurich is, frankly, torture. As is sitting in any chair with a backrest in the weeks to come.
She spends the rest of her weekend in Zurich working on the implant, like she told her family she would be, but finds herself largely incapable of focusing on anything that isn't the alien sensation on her back. Come Monday, on her third day without sleep, she calls in sick, and if the Commander catches wind of this, he makes no effort to call her out on the nebulous lie.
He doesn't have to.
I was under the impression you are incapable of falling sick. Athena's message reads in her Battlenet notifications mere seconds after she logs into her much-neglected account, searching for distraction.
Angela doesn't wince. She doesn't think she broke her promise to the AI with this, exactly, but if she hasn't crossed the line, she has certainly toed it with picking Uncle as her surgeon.
"It's not anything physical." She says out-loud. "I'm just feeling out of sorts."
It's not a lie, either. There's nothing wrong with her body, it simply needs some time getting used to its new parts. The problem is entirely in her head. Specifically, its point of joining with her neck.
"May I inquire as to what caused this?" The AI hijacks her speakers, taking Angela's words for the invitation they were.
Angela considers. Obviously, she can't divulge the entire truth, but a portion of it, most of it even, should be fine. She'll have to disclose parts of it sooner or later, anyway.
"I got my implant installed this saturday."
"Are there problems?" Is the first and immediate question pulling at the corners of Angela's lips.
"Not as such." She stands up in full view of her tablet's camera to perform a few stretches. "Everything works, I just feel off. My brain needs to adjust, it will pass."
"Understood," Athena says in a tone Angela imagines would come with a nod. "You did not mention you would be getting it done."
"I didn't feel like there was any need? I had a trusted surgeon on hand, so I got it done."
"May I ask the surgeon's name?"
Ah. Shit. Uh-
"Myself." Angela is rather proud of herself for the word coming out like a statement, rather than a question. "I repurposed my nanites to keep control over my hands without the nervous system. It was easy enough." She is rather proud of the speed at which she came up with the lie, too. It's not perfect, or even very good, with better ones coming to her even as she's saying it, but it's more important she presents the AI with something immediate, than entirely convincing.
"I'm calling the medical department."
What? "I'm fine, you don't need to-"
"Then the other doctors will confirm as much."
Angela closes her eyes. Huffs. Then, lets herself limply fall to the bed on her stomach. It's true enough. If everything has gone to plan, the worst anyone can do is tell her she did everything right.
"Fine. Fine. But I'm telling you, it's a waste of time."
"It isn't a waste of time to make sure you're alright, Angela. You regularly exhibit an alarming lack of care for your own wellbeing."
"It's not-" She groans, rolling onto her back just to wince and reverse back to her stomach again. "I'm fine. There was no risk involved. Worst case scenario, I would be paralysed, and someone would check up on me today." Said someone more than likely being Athena herself. Only, she wouldn't have found her. Possibly not ever. She makes sure not to have anything traceable on her during her visits. "I'm pretty sure it would take me months to die. Maybe years." Maybe decades if she did as she said. Who's to say her nanites wouldn't start converting nitrogen she breathes into nutrition, or recycle her spent breath? They have the capacity for it.
"Dispatch is asking if you can make it to the HQ on your own. May I have your verbal confirmation?"
Well. At least they're not sending a shuttle to collect her.
An hour later, Angela is rudely disabused of her comfortable supposition for the worst case scenario.
"What were you thinking?" Father chides her as they make their way to the infirmary.
"That it was safe enough and I could do it without involving more people than necessary? Which it was, and I did?"
"And if you were wrong?"
She really is not looking forward to having this same conversation for the third time with Mother, as well.
"Then you'd just find me in my apartment today, none the worse for wear, and put my spine back in. You're all overreacting."
"I'm overreacting. You took your spine out on your own, without anyone to supervise, and I'm overreacting." The man sighs. "What did you even do with it?"
"The spine? It's in the wardrobe." Angela's not sure what to actually do with it, but keeps the thing all the same. It feels… wrong, somehow, to entertain the idea of simply throwing it away like the trash it is. Maybe she's just growing old and sentimental like Father with his ever-growing collection of outdated arms. Maybe she'll keep all of her bones going forward and eventually put them all together for display.
The barrage of tests she's put through, naturally, finds nothing wrong at all. What damage and chafing one could expect from a fresh implant was taken care of the second Uncle turned her nanites back on in Toledo. That, at last, finally seems to help Father and Athena calm down. Her leave is extended from two days to a full week for the duration of which Angela chooses to return to Sweden.
Brigitte, at least, seems to find this new development simply fascinating.
"Can you feel it?" The girl asks, the both of them seated in her room as she's trailing her finger on the sheet of synthetic skin stretching across Angela's back.
"A little less than normal, but yes. I did have my nerves reattached.
"Okay. And this?"
Angela cranes her neck as far as she can to spy her sister's ministrations.
"That's my spine. You're not supposed to feel your own spine." That, and cramming haptic receptors inside would make it jut out even more.
"Yeah, but it's like- out. Isn't it dangerous?"
"It's sturdier than bone, so I'd say it's actually safer. Plus, it looks cool, don't you think?"
"Oh yeah! Like a power ranger!"
Power… anyway:
"That's nothing. Just you wait until I get the wings working."
Easier said than done, that. If she put her mind to it, she could likely craft herself a sensor-array suit to control her wings with body movement by the week's end. But then, how would it differ from simply strapping the system to a harness, and herself in it? Should somebody wish to bastardise her work like that, they are free to do so, but she will not.
Matching the hardware, software, and wetware to all work together in perfect harmony turns out largely to consist of trial and error. Angela will write a simulation. Code it into the piece, match it with the chip in her brain. Test. Improve what she can and discard what she can not. Then repeat. Again and again for incremental gains towards the finished product. It's not so much difficult or even frustrating as it is tedious. More so than usual. There aren't even any wrenches thrown in her path, it's all simply slow and methodical adjustment, one twitch of her wings at a time.
It's almost offensive when on a day like all others, Angela adds the latest line of code from her sim, and it simply clicks.
That is not to say her wings are ready, not just yet, but, the sheer relief from the unrelenting discomfort she's felt since installing the implant leaves her body melting the rest of the day. For the first time, it takes no more effort than to will, not even think, and one of her wings unfurls in all its scarlet glory, with the other one joining it the day after.
They don't quite move right, jerky and unsure. Or bend quite as effortlessly as her birth limbs do. Still, she makes to move and they follow. Before long, everything starts slotting into place as she for once can observe the effects of her brain waves on the machine, rather than the other way around.
Angela is twenty seven, and early snow just fell in Stockholm, when she flies for the first time.
She could've done it in Zurich. Was sorely tempted to for the whole three days she's had left until weekend, but the occasion feels too momentous not to share in it, and who better than her family, whose involvement should well award them the privilege anyway?
They all travel a distance from the city, to one of the thousand islands surrounding it, where no-one will disturb them. In a feat of clairvoyance, her parents bring along the thickest inflatable mattress they manage to procure online. Brigitte, for her part, contributes the skills from her arts and crafts class to help Angela modify her clothes in an effort to only ruin them a little, rather than completely, when her wings spring forth.
It goes smoothly at first. Or smoothly enough for something never before attempted in history. Angela pulls on her skiing goggles, before unfurling her wings in a blaze of scarlet light, dislodging the small mote of discomfort perpetually buried beneath her skin while keeping them folded. She rises slowly but steadily, much to her sister's very vocal joy and her parents' more reserved, but still proud applause. Her heart hammering an almost painful rhythm, Angela grins back at them before putting more power into her propellers - nothing more than stretching a muscle, as far as her brain is concerned - to glide backwards at a leisurely pace. Then forwards, and sideways, and in a circle.
"Do a barrel roll!" Brigitte shouts, her phone out to record for posterity and Athena, only to quickly be shushed by one of their parents while the other warns Angela not to even think about it.
Not that she was planning to try. She instinctively knows how the attempt would end in much the same way she knew not to try doing pirouettes when she first went ice skating with Mother. A human who never walked can't possibly break off into a sprint without falling, and Angela doesn't much like the thought of crashing to the ground.
Instead, she climbs higher, confident she can manage at least a loop, which she does, leaving herself a comfortable ten metres at its lowest point before pivoting up once more. It's exhilarating. And cold - the worst of it at her back where the wings poke through her clothing, and difficult to breathe with the air lashing against her face, and possibly the most fun she's ever had out. Then, she tries a hard turn, and instantly knows she's made a mistake; can feel it with her whole body before she even starts the first spiral.
She tries aiming for the mattress, or would have if she knew where it was in the nauseating spiral of colour her world becomes. Even so, she does manage to level off enough that when she falls to the ground mere seconds after her unfortunate turn, it happens at an angle, sending her tumbling for a distance in a tangle of limbs: flesh and hardlight. Finally, she halts, half-buried in the snow, where she lies, dazed, until Father's strong hands haul her up.
"Are you alright?" Her eyes drift from the man's worried eyes, past Mother's, to settle onto Brigitte's, who has thankfully given up on her task of recording.
"...I've had worse." She decides after sparing the question a moment and sitting up. The relief on her family's faces is entirely disproportionate for the occasion. This was- well, Angela doesn't know how high she climbed before taking the fall, but it's a percentage, maybe a two, of the dive she survived in Italy, where she had no wings to adjust her trajectory. "Just give me a moment, I'll try this again."
"How about you take it slow, instead?"
"I will take it slow, don't worry." She rolls her eyes at Mother. "It's not like I want to crash."
Not that it helps any in avoiding the multitude of tumbles that follow. By the end of the day, Angela comes home with a plan to further modify her wings, Brigitte with a sizable amount of incriminating recordings, and their parents with perhaps an additional grey hair or two.
The plan, one she runs by Father already on their way back to the city, consists of adding two more, smaller wings farther down her back to handle the issue of steering, with her primary two reserved for less violent manoeuvres. It takes them another week to produce the additional hardlight projector to replace the corresponding vertebrae with, then another before she wears her parents down to help her put it in place, as opposed to waiting for who knows how long for a proper surgery, then two more to calibrate her fourth set of limbs not to interfere with the third. She also commissions a thickly padded flight suit, something decidedly more mundane than whatever ideas Brigitte throws out, whose one sole purpose is to keep the frankly unbearable cold out.
Even with all this done, she takes her time before approaching the Commander again. Much as the issue was largely technical, the performance she's planning on will require more than just gliding to and fro at a slightly above ponderous pace. For the first time in her tenure, Angela elects to forgo regular overtime in favour of mastering the ins and outs of her flight.
It's hardly an unpleasant prospect. There's joy in flying unlike any other physical activity she's ever undertaken. In the way her heart stammers a second before she'd impale herself on a tree branch. In scooping up a plushie from the ground in a hard dive of a hundred kilometres per hour. In gliding down the length of a mountain, or joining a flock of geese high in the air. There's also something to be said about Brigitte alerting her to the online rumours regarding the Red Angel in the Stockholm skies, then finding their like in Switzerland.
When she does finally arrange for a presentation of her newfound ability, Angela makes sure to make it a spectacle for all to see. The more the better, that if her request were denied again, all the wounded field agents without hope for extraction would henceforth know who to thank for their deaths.
Her lift-off is swift and graceful, with none of the halting care from two months prior. She stops at an easy altitude of sixty metres to observe the gathered ant-like crowd. She can pick out Mr. Reinhardt, Morrison, Commander Reyes, Winston, Father, even Moira, who's emerged from her lab to see the ancient human dream realised at last. She'd like to see her colleague achieve what she has with her genetics.
She signals the agreed-upon start by flaring her wings, and dives. Hard.
Angela revels in the frosty air whipping against her cheeks and the alarmed cries of the spectating crowd both. At the last moment, she pulls sharply upwards, harmlessly speeding over everyone's heads, her propulsors at full capacity all the while. She reaches her target, another two hundred metres away, in an instant, stopping in a manner so abrupt as to undoubtedly break her old spine to pick the dummy up, and shoot out as if from a railgun with the clip-hooked soldier in her arms, performing a number of sharp air manoeuvres on the way back just to prove that she can.
Her landing in the designated area is far more gentle, though she wastes no time in unclipping her precarious cargo before taking to the sky again, intent on bringing the remaining nine in a timely fashion.
The presentation has more to do with an acrobatics show than anything else, and by design. Yes, she could simply pick up her targets and deposit them as quickly as possible in as straightforward a fashion as possible, but Angela will reserve such urgency for the battlefield. Here, now, she is making a point, having modified the raptora manoeuvres she's seen recorded on parades into something no other flight system in the world can manage, nor any other body. A fair number of the tricks she's designed for today would've killed any unenhanced individual, whether by snapping their fragile spine, or breaking on the ground due to unmanageable g-force.
Unmanageable for a normal person, that is.
When all is said and done, Angela returns to her position above the crowd, lips stretched wide in a radiant grin at the applause that meets her. She watches from on high as the people below crane their necks in wonder, many a pair of eyes shielded from the scarlet glare, yet still turned toward it, and more than a few of them shaded by the phones recording her.
Good. She thinks. Let the whole world see.