Chapter 30
"...Norman added you to a blacklist? But you're Harry's girlfriend! ...wait, MJ, don't cry..."
The names Norman and Harry hit me like a jolt of current, wiping away the last of the sleep fog instantly.
I sat up and listened.
It sounded like Harry Osborn had made some significant decision, and his all-powerful father was now handling the fallout.
But what decision?
Anything orbiting the Osborn family had the potential to erupt at any moment into an unpredictable cocktail of experimental serums, glider units, and unhinged genius.
Better to know now.
"...No, however prestigious this boarding college is, internet access and communication with the outside world are fundamental rights. Especially in Europe!" Peter's voice carried sharp frustration through the wall.
Europe.
No contact with Harry.
The picture was coming together.
"Yes, of course I'll dig into it. You keep trying to get through to Norman on your end. The whole thing is way too strange and rushed: Harry's just getting on a plane to another country..."
Or is it even another country? The question flashed through my mind.
Peter ended the call and turned around, finally noticing me standing in the bedroom doorway.
His face cycled through emotions in quick succession: confusion, worry, and a low-level anger.
"Did something happen?" I asked in the most neutral tone I could put together, playing someone who had just woken up.
"Something happened," he said, dropping down onto the couch.
"MJ's boyfriend Harry called her this morning and told her he's flying to Switzerland. Some exclusive boarding college called Eldbach Steurlich Institute. Three years, John. No internet, no cell service, not even mail. A complete communications blackout in the twenty-first century. Can you even imagine that?"
"Hmm. And? Harry is Norman Osborn's son. I crossed paths with him once," I said, catching Peter's slightly surprised look.
"Who can really explain the logic of people like that?" I shrugged, deliberately uninterested, leaving room for him to fill in the gaps.
"Wouldn't surprise me if boarding schools like that are just standard fixtures in their world. Building the right connections, away from the rest of us."
"That's just it, this is completely out of character for Harry!" Peter was on his feet again.
"He went to regular schools his whole life. He hated every business event his father dragged him to, constantly complained about being forced to perform for other people's expectations."
"Well, maybe this is the moment he finally decided to meet those expectations. Norman probably saw it the same way," I continued, holding firm.
"Harry would have told her ahead of time! He would absolutely have warned MJ." Peter was close to shouting now.
"They have a real relationship. They've been together since high school. He completely adores her. And instead, just a cold call. A statement of fact. No argument, no explanation. He just accepted it and cut off his closest person because his father said so. It didn't sound like him."
"Hmm. If everything you're saying holds up, that is strange," I said, letting a deliberate pause suggest I was turning it over in my mind.
"Maybe it actually wasn't Harry on the call at all?"
"What do you mean?"
"A voice actor, or a program. And the real Harry was already in the air under escort before the call even went out. Norman handled the call himself so nobody would start asking questions or looking for his son."
Peter went still, sitting with that.
I did not fully believe the theory myself, but it had just the right comic-book-plausible quality to land convincingly.
"That's..." he frowned.
"That's completely insane, but... it does fit Norman's pattern. He's genuinely unpredictable sometimes. Once he personally showed up at school to pick up Harry and even gave me a ride home. And he came to my birthday once." An old, unresolved note crept into his voice alongside the surprise.
"Aunt May was absolutely stunned: a billionaire sitting in our kitchen eating her apple pie, while an hour of his time was worth more than her annual salary. My point is, his actions don't always follow ordinary logic."
"Well then, at least you have a starting point," I said, offering a measured smile. I'd gathered enough for now.
I had no intention of getting involved in Osborn's business, but I had no reason to talk Peter out of digging either.
Norman had almost certainly prepared a cover story, which meant the college probably did exist.
"Yeah... um, John..." Peter muttered, standing up with a guilty expression.
"I should probably get going."
My smile faded.
"What? Right now? What about the work on the Elixir?" A sharp edge crept into my voice unbidden.
"We had an agreement. Today was supposed to count for something real."
"It's MJ... she's really not doing well right now... she doesn't understand any of it..." His voice trailed off under my steady gaze.
"I'll come back, I genuinely will. Tonight..."
He was backing toward the door, visibly torn between his loyalty to his friend and the work we'd agreed to.
I said nothing, letting the silence carry the full weight of my disapproval.
And there it was.
Real life asserting itself.
All the friendships, the relationships, the entanglements: dead weight dragging genius down toward ordinary routine.
Still, damn it all.
I cursed inwardly, watching him.
How did I manage to forget that behind the extraordinary intellect was still a socially awkward kid who was completely wrapped up in a girl?
And now that he had a chance to be her anchor, her shoulder to lean on, of course he was going to take it.
All of our work, all the plans, every one of them, was going to sit waiting while teenage feelings called the shots.
Fine.
I was past letting that show.
The Elixir would wait.
I made myself exhale and consciously wiped the cold mask of irritation from my face.
Control.
That was what mattered.
Control first, always.
"Alright," I said, keeping my voice deliberately even.
"Just unexpected. But I understand. When should I expect you back?"
"After lunch, I'm thinking," he said, the relief audible.
"MJ just needs to talk through it, and she tends to talk a lot when she's upset."
"Understood. Just make sure you don't do too much talking yourself," I said, meeting his eyes directly.
"Of course, John!" Peter nodded immediately, catching the meaning without further prompting.
"Personal stays personal, and what's secret stays secret. I know how to keep things quiet. Don't worry."
He called a cab, packed his tablet and notebook into his backpack in under a minute, then paused, reconsidered, and left the backpack with me.
A quiet pledge of his return.
He was already at the door when his phone rang again.
He looked at the screen.
"Doctor Connors?" he said, quietly puzzled.
A cold prickle moved through me.
Bad feeling.
"Speaker, please," I said.
Peter gave me a slightly confused look but pressed the button.
"Hello, Peter? I wanted to ask about your schedule over the next couple of weeks," a tired, strained male voice said through the speaker.
"Um..." Peter glanced at me.
"Aside from a couple of personal projects today and tomorrow, the rest of the week is fairly open. Why?"
"Excellent. Would you be able to start Thursday, filling in for Gwen during her lab hours? We would adjust your pay accordingly."
Something's happened with Gwen.
"What's going on with her?" Peter voiced the question I was thinking.
A heavy pause settled over the line.
When Connors spoke again, his voice was lower, carrying something genuine and difficult.
"She... her father passed away. Captain George Stacy. She's in no condition to be in the lab or in class right now. I understand completely."
There it was.
The key event.
Harsh and precise and completely on schedule.
However cynical it might sound, this was probably how it had to be.
In a significant portion of the multiverse variations I could recall from fragmented meta-knowledge, attempts to prevent events like this, Uncle Ben's death, Captain Stacy's, had not produced better outcomes.
They had produced catastrophes.
The kind of global unraveling that made the Chitauri invasion look like a local disturbance.
We were talking about the collapse of entire realities.
So no.
I would not be touching this under any circumstances, however brutal it was for Gwen.
"Yes... yes, of course, Doctor Connors," Peter answered, his voice unsteady.
"Please pass along my condolences to her. I'll cover Gwen's hours, no question."
The call ended.
Peter lowered the phone and stood motionless, staring at nothing in particular.
A heavy silence settled over the living room.
"Did you know?" His voice was quiet and unexpectedly measured, and though the question seemed strange on its surface, it was perfectly logical given that I had asked him to put the call on speaker.
"How would I?" I met his eyes without looking away.
"I first heard Gwen's name from you just a couple of days ago, let alone anything about her father. It was the second unexpected call that morning. Something told me to pay attention."
And it was true.
September 22, Tuesday.
The Fantastic Four launched into space.
Harry Osborn disappeared to Europe.
Gwen Stacy, currently Spider-Woman and not yet fighting threats more serious than street crime, lost her father: the event that would set her on a different and harder path.
Three extraordinary events in a single morning.
Two of them had landed directly on Peter, who, in so many versions across the multiverse, tended to serve as either a connecting thread or an accelerant for the larger machinery of events.
Maybe that was paranoia.
Or maybe the Master Clockmaker part of me was doing what it did: registering details, assembling them into a mechanism.
And right now it was telling me clearly that something larger had been set in motion.
The gears had shifted.
Something big had started.
"Yeah... sorry," Peter said, shaking his head to clear it.
"Just... two pieces of bad news before noon. I'll get going. Stay in touch."
He left.
I stayed behind in the quiet of the empty house and asked myself what to do next.
The answer was obvious.
I had been putting this off long enough.
I opened the system interface.
Technologies tab.
My hand hovered over the entry I wanted without hesitation.
Technological Modernization.
I pressed confirm.
The OP balance shifted from 1,100 to 400.
In the same instant, my world detonated.
This was not simply a headache.
This was a complete structural event.
The sensation of my skull splitting open to admit molten knowledge.
Blueprints, schematics, physical laws, chemical formulas, materials science principles, and quantum engineering concepts tore through my mind at the speed of light.
Millions of gigabytes of data poured directly into my brain.
I managed a single step toward the couch before my legs gave out entirely, and darkness closed over everything.
The knowledge that had just been loaded turned out to be only the visible tip of something far larger.
Because after the darkness came the dreams.
I was definitely dreaming.
Something dense and strange pushed through even the residual pain in my skull.
A red, dust-covered planet beneath an alien sun.
Giant, chitinous humanoid insects, their chirping resonating in my bones.
And me, one of hundreds of colonist-scientists, surviving in that environment.
The memory of high-tech laboratories on a distant, blue Earth carried a physical ache.
Here on Mars, everything had to be built from salvage.
From a centrifuge, a 3D printer, and a handful of optical components, I had assembled a directed-energy weapon.
Electronic grenades with effects that defied clean categorization.
An exoskeleton for the left arm, which I remembered driving clean through one of those creatures.
Ideas had never been the limiting factor.
Equipment was the shackle: twenty-first-century tools in a situation that demanded more.
But I had not stopped.
Not until one of the creatures proved faster than I had calculated.
Its limb, sharp as volcanic glass, punched through my armor and through me in the same motion.
And then I woke up.
"Hell!" I sat up sharply on the couch, hands pressing immediately against my stomach.
Nothing.
"What was that? Why was it so real?"
The memories had not dissolved with the dream.
The experience had not faded.
The lived knowledge of survival on a hostile world, the experience of a brilliant engineer forced to create under conditions of near-total material scarcity, all of it had stayed.
It was now part of me, a fully integrated archive loaded directly into memory.
"And this is only an Uncommon skill," I said to the empty garage.
I was about to head straight to the workspace to find out how this new upgrade functioned in practice when my phone vibrated.
Blade.
I thought back to my running mental note about September 22.
This was not a coincidence.
"Yo, greetings, rookie!" The obscenely cheerful bass voice of the city's most dangerous vampire hunter came through the line.
"Hey. Why so pleased with yourself?"
"Ho-ho! That obvious? Fine, I won't pretend. I finally got a slippery, clever piece of work I've been after. Pureblood, first generation. I made sure he had a thorough introduction to silver."
I ran through what I knew of the vampire hierarchy.
Pureblood first generation: third in the power structure, directly below the Progenitor and his Descendants.
Serious prey.
"Your miracle elixir gets the credit," Blade continued, and real gratitude lay beneath the usual bravado.
"I swear, in nearly two hundred years, I have never felt my mind work that cleanly. Every lead, every rumor, everything my sources had given me, living and otherwise, it all just locked into one complete picture. I suddenly knew exactly where this creature had been hiding. San Francisco, if you can believe it. Sitting in casinos and burning through money while I spent years on the trail. I paid him a visit. Gave him the most memorable night of his very long existence."
"Glad it helped. Now you understand why that elixir is worth what it is to me."
"You said it. But here's the actual point of the call. I wasn't hunting him just for the satisfaction. He was Vhau's progeny. You follow?"
"Not really," I admitted, sifting through what I knew.
"Right, I only gave you the broad strokes before. Short version: Vhau is one of five surviving Descendants. And he is the kind of creature that makes the others look like children with attitude problems by comparison. I have been hunting him for ten years. And now I have a real opening: he may come out himself to avenge what I just did to his boy."
"The other Descendants," I said. "What can you tell me about them?"
"Of the five, only two are even close to reasonable. Dracula, who you've heard of, has been consolidating vampire civilians under his wing, and yes, that's actually a demographic that exists. Then there's Marak, a calculating researcher type and founder of the Mystiel clan. I check in on him periodically to confirm he hasn't started using people as test subjects. So far, so good." A brief pause.
"That leaves two. The kind of creatures whose reputations have leaked out to human awareness. Nosferatu and Lamia. Exactly what those names conjure: a pale, skeletal ghoul and a woman who isn't entirely human. Unlike Vhau, whose Krieger clan is the most overtly militaristic, these two are essentially cowards. They've spent centuries in the deepest places they could find, hoping the world forgets them. Don't worry, Uncle Blade will get around to them eventually. Let them keep hoping. Hope is a fragile thing."
"So Vhau first, and then the Progenitor, you mentioned..." I started.
"Vhau first. As for their father, Varnae..." Blade let out a low, dry laugh.
"I remember what I said. Impossibly powerful. He'd dismantle me without effort. But he doesn't involve himself in this world's affairs. He's become the stuff of myth at this point, possibly not even located in our reality anymore. Their conflicts are their problem. I'd wager everything I have that he won't move regardless of how many of them I take off the board."
"Understood. Good luck with the hunt. Was bragging the only reason you called?"
"Hell, no. Nearly forgot entirely. Can I swing by tomorrow evening? Just getting back from the City of Sin."
I ran the timeline.
Peter and I had work today and tomorrow.
On Thursday, he picked up his new lab shift at the university.
"No problem. What for?"
"Remember I mentioned something worth trading for your mind-expanding elixir?"
"I remember."
"Tomorrow we talk. Be there."
He hung up.
I leaned back against the couch and let the day's events settle over me.
Reed Richards moving into orbit.
Harry Osborn gone to Europe.
Gwen Stacy's world cracking open.
Blade's personal campaign against the upper levels of the vampire hierarchy.
September 22 had been generous with consequences.
What I urgently needed now was to understand what I had actually acquired.
What Technological Modernization meant in practice rather than in the abstract.
I got up and walked with purpose toward the garage.
The outside world's chaos would still be there.
Right now it was time to build.
Time to find out what the engineer from Mars, now living inside this body, was actually capable of.
//=================//