Mechanical-Arm Spider #78.
The sub-level had been running for ten hours straight when Dante's call came through.
Dr. Chen took it at the secondary station, standing, because sitting implied a comfort she wasn't going to perform for him right now. Around her the lab was in the particular state of controlled disorder that followed a night of real work -- sensor logs still open on three screens, the engagement data from Arm and Leg's morning deployment pulling across the fourth in a readout that she hadn't stopped reviewing since the first feeds came in at eight. Her team moved around her with the quiet efficiency of people who understood that the work didn't pause for administrative pressure, which was the only way she'd been able to build a team worth keeping.
Dante's voice came through without preamble.
"What went wrong?"
She pulled up the overlay. "The subjects performed within projected parameters for the first twenty minutes of engagement. Coordination between the two was -- the synchronization held under conditions we haven't been able to replicate in controlled testing. The Leg's flash-step sequencing adapted to the Spider's evasion patterns in real time. The Arm's discharge cycling maintained stability through repeated use." She paused, because what came next required him to hear it as data and not as excuse. "The Spider exceeded the load threshold we had modeled. That's not a failure of the subjects. That's a ceiling we now know exists and can build past."
"He ripped the arm off your subject."
"Yes."
"That sounds like a failure."
"It sounds like one," she said. "The engagement data says something different. Every movement those two made this morning -- the joint stress, the neuro-interface response under pressure, the meta-gene activation patterns during peak load -- we've never had readings like this from a live scenario." She let that sit for a second. "Now we know what's been holding our integration back from matching our target output."
A silence on the other end that she'd learned, over two years of working under Dante, to read as him deciding whether to push or redirect.
"Tell me."
She looked at the readout on the fourth screen -- the meta-gene activation curve overlaid against the cybernetic response log, the gap between the two visible as a lag that widened under sustained stress, the point where the organic and the mechanical stopped reinforcing each other and started competing. "The integration architecture we're running requires an exterior mediation layer to keep the meta-gene and the cybernetics synchronized under peak load. Without it, the organic side overdrives the mechanical, or the mechanical dampens the organic, and you lose the compounding effect that makes the enhancement work at full capacity." She pulled up a secondary graph. "We've known this gap existed. What we didn't have until this morning was a precise measurement of it under real conditions. Now we can build something to close it from the inside -- no exterior mediation, no dependency on outside architecture. Full autonomous integration."
"More research," Dante said. "That's what I'm hearing."
"That's how the science works."
The silence this time was a different kind. "Being ready for anything," he said, "is how the world works." A pause that had weight in it. "Time is a luxury we can no longer afford Doctor. The Spider is headed your way and as long as he gets within proximity of the building, I want him captured. Have the full body ready by then." Another pause. "I've kept the city's chaos off your doorstep. The rest is yours."
"Don't fail me, Doctor."
The call ended.
She set the phone down and looked at the readout for a moment, and then she went back to work.
That was before the Canary Cry reached them.
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
The space beneath the Castellan Building's east face was a utility corridor that had been built for maintenance and retrofitted for something else. The pipes running along the ceiling were original -- conduit bundles and HVAC ducting -- but the walls had been paneled in a composite material that was too clean for a utility corridor, and the lighting was recessed rather than overhead-mounted, and the floor was poured epoxy rather than bare concrete. It ran south, sloping gently downward until it became something that had never been a maintenance corridor at all.
Security doors. The first one was steel-core with a card reader and a separate biometric panel, and it had been blown open from the inside when the Canary Cry above collapsed the entry point and sent a pressure wave down the corridor. The door sat in its frame at a forty-degree angle, the lock mechanism visible where the frame had separated, and through it they could hear alarms.
The second door, another thirty feet south, was intact.
It had held the pressure wave -- the engineering on it was heavy enough that the composite panels around it had bent inward on both sides while the door itself didn't move. Triple-lock, no visible card reader, a camera dome above the frame tracking their approach.
Someone on the other side of it was watching them right now.
He concentrated the symbiote into his right arm, and hit the door at the lock cluster with everything he had. The first impact bent the outer face. The second opened a gap at the frame. The third --
The door released from the inside.
It swung back and the light beyond it flooded the corridor and the sound of alarms came with it, high-frequency breach protocol, and through the door was a room that had no business existing under a biotech building.
The ceiling was high with cable trays running in parallel lines above equipment stations that lined three walls. Assembly stations -- that was the right word, not labs, because the work happening at them was about integration rather than research. Partial mechanical limb assemblies in various states of completion sat in padded cradles on the benches, alongside neuro-interface arrays still in housing, beside rows of compound vials racked in refrigerated carriers that had been pulled away from their wall mounts in the evacuation and left half-extended.
Six workstations on the east wall showed active screens that nobody was watching anymore because the fourteen people who'd been in this room were now compressed against the west wall as far from the door as the space allowed, some of them in lab coats, two in security gear with masks up, one in a suit that had probably looked businesslike an hour ago.
The two in security gear moved first.
Canary met the closer one before he'd closed half the distance -- elbow redirecting his leading arm, hip dropping him hard, the movement so trained it had no hesitation anywhere in it. The second came wide around her and Jake's web caught him at the chest and yanked him off his feet before he could reach her, the line reeling him back against the equipment bench with enough force to sit him down and keep him there. Sleeper hardened across the adhesion point, fixing him to the bench's edge.
The room went still after that. The alarms kept cycling. Nobody else tried anything.
He worked through them efficiently. Web lines across wrists, across torsos where posture suggested someone still calculating the angles. He kept the outputs low and even, the webs setting at tension that held without cutting, and inside two minutes the room was secured and the only thing moving was the readouts on the east wall screens and the overhead alarm lights cycling amber through the space.
Eleven people. Eleven sets of eyes tracking him with the particular quality of people who'd run the numbers and found them bad.
He walked to the nearest of them -- a man in a technician's vest, mid-thirties, webbed to the wall at the shoulder and hip, mask already up from when Canary had cleared the room. Close enough that Sleeper's ambient output had somewhere to go.
He didn't flood it. Just let the contact work -- the slow build of it, warmth moving through the air between them at the range where it functioned the way it was supposed to. The man's breathing changed first. Then the set of his jaw. Then his eyes, which had been tracking escape vectors, settled.
"Who in this room can fix a mechanical limb integration?" Jake asked.
The technician's gaze moved without resistance. West wall, third from the south end. A woman in a lab coat over civilian clothes, mid-forties, her wrists webbed to a cable tray running at shoulder height. She'd been watching the exchange with an expression that had something focused in it even through the alarm cycling and the armed stranger moving through her lab.
"Her," the technician said. "Dr. Chen. She runs the integration program."
He crossed the room.
She watched him come. Her chin was up and her weight was distributed like someone who'd decided, in the thirty seconds since the door opened, that she wasn't going to perform fear for whoever this was. Her eyes went to the mechanical arm and stayed there for a beat -- professional attention overriding everything else -- and then came back to his face.
"I'm not telling you anything," she said. Flat. Decided.
He stopped in front of her. Close enough. Sleeper adjusted, the output finding the air between them, and he watched her feel it arrive -- the slight shift in her breathing, the line of her shoulders moving through something that wasn't quite resistance anymore, her eyes tracking to his face with the particular quality of directed focus.
She felt it happening. Her jaw tightened against it. "I'm not--" The words came out with less edge than she'd put into the first set.
Then they didn't come at all.
Her shoulders came down. The focus in her eyes remained -- that was hers, not the compound -- but the defiance underneath it had stopped finding purchase. She looked at the arm again, and this time what moved across her face was something closer to curiosity than hostility.
"Fix it," he said.
Her eyes stayed on the arm. "How long have you had it attached like this?"
"How long will it take?"
"Months," she said. "If we follow the right procedures -- iterative nerve mapping, template calibration, staged load testing." She paused. "Seconds, if we had a sync-bridge."
He looked at her.
"A mediation interface," she said. "Something that reads your nervous system's signal pattern and feeds the arm a pre-built template to negotiate from, instead of building the map from nothing. Without it, we do this by hand."
"Ten minutes," he said.
She opened her mouth.
"Ten minutes to fix it and remove any tracking systems. Failsafes. Remote access. And whatever else this building has built into the arm." He added.
Her eyes moved to the room -- the webbed technicians, the active screens, the half-extended equipment racks. The calculation was visible. Then she looked back at him, and something in her had settled into a different register entirely: not compliance, not fear, but the specific focus of someone who had just been handed a problem worth solving.
"I'll need two of my team free to assist," she said.
"Point to them."
She did.
Support: Patreon.com/mimiclord for SMiD (+30 Chapters advance), TDBB (+5 Chapters advance), Side Quests (Full Access for: GLFN, STD, FoM, MCc... and more!), Free Art Illustrations, Weekly Side Quest Polls, Commissions (DM) and more!
SMiD Forum: