The universe screams in static.
It's a language I understand better than most. A chorus of dying signals from worlds that no longer exist, bleeding through the fragile skin of the Nexus. Most hear it as noise. I hear it as a report. Tonight, the report comes from Earth-218.
The main monitor flickers, a blizzard of corrupted data resolving into a fractured image. Spider-UK—Billy Braddock—his faceplate cracked, the Union Jack emblem smeared with something dark and viscous. Behind him, the polished metal of a fallen Spider-Armor, its pilot a mangled heap within. The audio is a shredded mess, punctuated by the wet, tearing sounds of something fundamental coming apart.
"—Nexus Command, do you read? This is Braddock! We're… we're taking heavy losses! The target is… adaptive."
His camera feed jitters. In the background, a silhouette shifts against the flickering emergency lights of a ruined cityscape. It's a smudge in reality, a glitch in the shape of a man, moving with a liquid grace that defies anatomy. It stops, its head tilting.
Then, a voice cuts through the static. Not Braddock's. It's the voice of the Spider-Man from Earth-90210, the one who went dark ten minutes ago. Clear as a bell.
"Don't worry, Billy. I've got your back."
Braddock whirls around. "Ben? Ben, is that you? I thought you were—"
The silhouette flows forward. The feed distorts into a kaleidoscope of red and blue. We hear Braddock's panicked breathing. "It's speaking— it's— oh God, it sounds like—"
Static. A new voice, this one belonging to the team's teenage Spider-Girl, her tone trembling. "Peter?"
A final transmission, cold and empty, a perfect mimicry of her fallen mentor. "Not Peter. Not anymore."
A scream, high and thin, is surgically sliced by the termination of the signal. The monitor goes black, save for a single, blinking red line: CONNECTION LOST.
In the ensuing silence of the command center, Miles Morales's voice is a sharp crack. "All available operatives, scramble to these coordinates. We need eyes on-site, now!"
He doesn't have to give me the order. I was already moving. The Web of Life and Destiny is a system, a grand, chaotic pattern. I felt the bleed from Earth-218 long before the call came in—a psychic shearing, a thread not just cut, but rewritten with diseased code. My portal shimmers open, a tear in the Nexus's sterile reality. I step through, not to rescue, but to contain. The filth must be cataloged before it can be sterilized.
Earth-218 is a tomb wrapped in silk and bone.
The air is thick with the smell of ozone and something else, something cloyingly sweet, like rotting fruit and old blood. The cityscape is a skeletal ruin, every skyscraper and brownstone draped in thick, pulsating cocoons. They are not the clean, white webbing of a Spider-Totem. This is a perversion—a grimy, grey material interwoven with splintered ribs, femurs, and vertebrae, all glistening under the sickly green light of a dead sun. It's the nest architecture I've seen before, but on a planetary scale. A world consumed.
My boots make no sound on the web-choked streets. Silence is a weapon. In my hand, a custom-built scanner hums softly, its needle quivering. The display is a mess of chaotic readings. Faint signatures of Totemic energy, once pure, now corrupted. Inverted. Rewritten into a new, malignant syntax.
I find what's left of Braddock's team near the source of the broadcast. They are… incorporated. Partially cocooned, their bodies little more than desiccated husks still clad in the vibrant colors of their costumes. Their masks are pulled taut, distorted into rictus grins. The webbing that binds them is blackened, burnt from the inside out, as if their very essence was siphoned through it. A failed immune response.
I kneel by Braddock, my scanner passing over his suit. Essence drained. Totemic signature nullified. Another data point for the file.
Then I hear it. A whisper from the shadows of a collapsed overpass.
"You left me behind, Rorschach."
The voice is perfect. A flawless recording of Gwendolyn Stacy's. Every inflection, every trace of hope and hurt I've heard in her voice, polished and aimed like a weapon.
My hand tightens around the grip of my sonic baton. Neural response remains flat. Adrenaline spike logged, but dismissed as unproductive. I do not reply. The voice is a variable, an attempt to provoke a patterned response.
The mimicry continues, shifting its attack vector. Now, it's Miles. "We're a team, man. You can't just go it alone."
Then, the worst of it. A voice scraped from my own throat, a dry, guttural whisper echoing back at me from the darkness.
"Rights are illusions. Variables must be controlled."
The words are mine. The cadence is mine. It has been listening. Not just here. Across the threads. It has been studying the pattern.
It coalesces from the shadows under the overpass. It is a grotesque parody, a blasphemous approximation of a Spider-being. Humanoid, but hideously wrong. Its limbs are too long, bending at impossible angles. Its mask is not a mask at all, but a seamless fusion of web and flesh, the eye lenses flickering through a frantic rainbow of colors—the red of one Parker, the white of another, the blue of Braddock. The eyes of every Totem it has consumed.
It mirrors my stance. The shift of weight to my left foot, the slight angle of my shoulders. It learns in real-time. My combat patterns, my readiness. It's downloading me.
Journal Entry: Subject designated "Weaver's Child" has been upgraded to "Filth That Learns." Adaptation without morality. Intelligence without identity. Pattern without soul. A cancer that studies the cure.
I don't wait for it to complete the download. I lunge, baton humming. The filth moves with a twitching, erratic speed, its stolen skills still settling into its new form. It dodges, but it's clumsy—a puppet learning its strings. It copies my jab, but the angle is wrong. I deflect, driving a high-frequency sonic pulse into its chest.
It recoils, not in pain, but in… analysis. Its body shudders, and the flickering in its eyes intensifies. The attack was data.
I press the advantage. A canister rolls from my belt, releasing a cloud of high-adhesion accelerant. I activate the igniter on my gauntlet. A small, controlled flamethrower erupts, engulfing the creature.
For a moment, it burns. Then, mid-incineration, its skin hardens, taking on a blackened, ceramic sheen. It is adapting to the heat, rewriting its own biology on the fly. It steps out of the fire, smoking but intact.
Then it speaks. Not with one voice, but with all of them at once. A cacophony of the dead, a choir of stolen identities overlapping into a single, monstrous whole.
"WE ARE LEGION. WE ARE PATTERN PERFECTED. YOU CANNOT CONTAIN PATTERN."
The sound is a physical blow, a sonic assault composed of dead heroes' final words. It throws a web line—not a single strand, but a thick cable woven from the colors of a dozen different costumes—and yanks a chunk of concrete from the wall, slinging it at me. I roll clear, the slab shattering where I stood. Direct combat is no longer a viable tactic. It only makes the filth stronger. It only teaches it my playbook.
Time for a new play.
Retreat is a tactical maneuver, not a defeat. I fire a grapple line into the skeletal remains of a skyscraper and ascend, moving with disciplined speed. The creature follows, scuttling up the wall with the unnatural ease of an insect, its too-long limbs finding purchase everywhere.
I lead it higher, through a maze of collapsing web-strands that connect the dead buildings like rotten ligaments. I'm not running from it. I'm pulling it into the kill-box.
This section of Earth-218 is terminally corrupt. The thread connecting it to the Great Web is gangrenous, a conduit for the infection. It cannot be salvaged. It must be amputated.
I reach the designated point—the nexus of three decaying buildings. I leap across the chasm to the adjacent rooftop, turn, and face my pursuer. It lands opposite me, head cocked, the chorus of voices whispering from its fused mask.
"RUNNING. A PREDICTABLE PATTERN. FEAR-BASED."
"Not fear," I state, my thumb hovering over the detonator in my palm. "Extermination."
I depress the switch.
Three reality-destabilizing charges, planted on my way up, detonate simultaneously. They are not conventional explosives. They don't target matter; they target the code of this specific reality-strand. The explosion is silent, a wave of pure, geometric static that washes over everything. The corrupted webbing evaporates. The buildings dissolve into shimmering, pixelated dust. The very fabric of this localized space unravels.
The blast engulfs the Weaver's Child. It emits a shriek of digital feedback, the chorus of voices glitching and distorting as they are un-written from existence. For a moment, there is only the clean, white void of erasure.
Containment achieved.
Or so I think. From my vantage point several blocks away, I watch the void begin to seal. And in the residual energy, something reforms. Like smoke coalescing into a phantom limb, a fragment of the creature pulls itself back into being from the leftover, corrupted webbing. It is smaller, wounded, its form unstable. But it is alive.
Before the void completely closes, its voice, now singular and weak but still sharp with malice, echoes across the gap.
"CONTAINMENT… DENIED."
Then it fades, dissipating back into the corrupted pathways of the Web. The immediate threat is neutralized, but the disease remains in the system.
The debriefing room at the Nexus is cold and sterile, a stark contrast to the organic rot of Earth-218. Miles and Gwen stand before the holographic display, their expressions grim. There is a tension in the room, a silence that hums with unspoken questions. Especially between Gwen and me.
I deliver my report. My voice is flat, devoid of emotion. Facts. Data. Observations.
"The entity is a parasitic intelligence. A memetic virus that assimilates the patterns of its victims—combat skills, memories, voices." I pause. "I have designated it 'Filth That Learns'."
Gwen visibly flinches at the term, her arms crossed tight against her chest. "It's made of them, isn't it? The Spiders it kills."
"They are the raw data it uses for replication. It is a disease that studies the immune system it is attacking."
Miles clenches his fists. "Then we hit it. Hard. A coordinated strike. We assemble every powerhouse we have and we wipe that thing from existence."
"Negative," I state, my tone absolute. "That strategy is flawed. The entity evolves through observation. Every move we make becomes data. Every mistake we make becomes instruction. A full-scale assault would be a feast. It would learn every power, every weakness. It would become unstoppable."
"So what's your solution?" Miles challenges, his frustration evident. "We just let it keep eating worlds?"
"We quarantine," I reply. "I have already begun the process. Isolate Earth-218 completely. Sever every adjacent thread in the Web. Starve it of new data. Starve it of new food. Containment is the only logical course of action."
A tense quiet settles over the room. I omitted the details of the mimicry. The sound of Gwen's voice used as a weapon. The sound of my own. It is irrelevant data. A vulnerability to be noted and discarded, not shared.
Later. Analysis requires solitude.
I sit in a dark observation room, the only light coming from the audio workstation in front of me. On the screen is the recovered recording from Braddock's team. I play the fragment on a loop. The one where the creature speaks, right before the signal cut.
"Not Peter. Not anymore."
I strip away the layers of vocal mimicry, filtering for background noise, for subliminal data. I enhance a specific microsecond of the recording, the infinitesimal pocket of silence between the filth's words.
And there it is.
Beneath the overlapping voices of the dead, beneath the static and the screaming code, I hear something new. Something it must have picked up from me, across the Web, even before our encounter.
My own breathing pattern. The steady, controlled rhythm I use during observation. In-two, hold-four, out-three. A pattern I have perfected over years. It had already started learning me.
My eyes drift up from the screen to my own reflection in the dark glass of the monitor. For a split second, an impossible, horrifying moment, the face staring back seems to twitch, the shifting inkblots of my mask moving with an independence that is not my own.
An illusion. A trick of the light and fatigue. Must be.
But the thought takes root, cold and sharp as a shard of ice in my gut.
Filth learns patterns. Patterns learn filth. Question becomes… which side of the glass I'm on.
————————————————————————————————————
The carcass of Earth-218's Web-thread hung in the void like a petrified nerve cluster. Once a radiant artery of the great multiverse, it was now just brittle, grey strands of possibility, dead to the touch. The silence here was a physical weight, broken only by the subsonic hum of cosmic decay.
Amidst this silent tomb, something stirred.
A single, necrotic strand began to tremble, then writhe. It drew other, lesser filaments toward it, not with life, but with a cold, magnetic will. Ash and memory, the dust of a billion collapsed choices, constricted around this focal point. The particles knotted together, weaving a dense, lightless shell that pulsed with a faint, angry red. Slowly, agonizingly, it took on a new shape: the stark, iconic outline of a Spider's mask. A cocoon forged of nothing but sheer, obsessive purpose.
From within, whispers began to leak into the void. They were not the cries of the reality that had died, but the fractured thoughts of the one thing that had refused to. A chorus of a single, shattered mind, speaking with the flat, gravelly tone of a man long past empathy.
"City is afraid of me. Have seen its true face."
The red glow within the cocoon intensified, the heat of a buried furnace.
"The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood… and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown."
The whispers were sharpening, coalescing. The disparate, echoing fragments of a broken psyche were reassembling themselves, not healing, but being hammered back into a functional, if jagged, whole. The trauma was not being overcome; it was being weaponized.
"Never compromise. Not even in the face of death."
A final, unifying thought solidified the chorus into a singular, unwavering declaration. The voice that spoke now was not a whisper, but a vow etched into the fabric of the dead space.
"Mission is containment… not comfort."
The cocoon cracked. Not with the gentle unfurling of new life, but with the sharp snap of a breaking bone. A figure pulled itself from the shell, its form stark and angular. Its suit was a grimy, off-white canvas, and the mask was not a piece of fabric, but a shifting, liquid-crystal faceplate where black ink-blot patterns swirled and reformed with grim symmetry. Thin, grey webs, tough as tungsten wire, extruded from its wrists, not for swinging, but for binding.
It surveyed the wreckage of its home dimension, its posture rigid, analytical. There was no grief in its stance, only assessment. The problem was larger than one city now. The rot was in the foundations of reality. He looked out into the decaying multiverse, towards the distant, sterile light of the Nexus. A sanctuary. A fragile variable in an equation of chaos.
Another problem to be contained.
The figure stepped out of the husk of its own rebirth, leaving the dead Web-thread behind.