Alcatraz was a maze with lock area everywhere. The maintenance hatch hadn't led to a control room or a prison block. It had hissed open to reveal a space that shouldn't have existed within the cold, limestone confines of Alcatraz.
The room was a perfect, seamless sphere of polished chrome, hundreds of feet in diameter. There were no corners, no shadows, and no sound except for the rhythmic, electronic thrum that Matt had described earlier. It was a cathedral of data, illuminated by a pale, shifting blue light that seemed to pulse from the floor itself.
"Ah, Damn it," Peter whispered, his spider-sense not just buzzing, but vibrating with a sustained, low-frequency warning. "I have a bad feeling. This place reminds me of the X-Men's Danger Room."
"I don't know what that means," Matt said, his head pivoting slowly. "This place makes it hard for me as sound get rebounded back so it's like I see double."
Richard Rider stepped forward, his boots clanking against the mirror-finish floor. "Well, whatever this place is, let's just find the 'Off' switch. I'm tired of being attacked and scanned."
As if responding to his challenge, the air in the center of the sphere began to shimmer. It wasn't the heat-haze of a teleporter or the crackle of an energy weapon. It was the high-speed assembly of photons—hard-light constructs being woven out of the very air.
One by one, the silhouettes solidified. Peter's heart hammered against his ribs as he recognized the faces. These weren't the "Cataloguer Drones" or mindless sentinels. These were ghosts of the people who should have been attacking this place.
Storm descended from the ceiling, her eyes glowing with white static. Wolverine crouched in a feral stalk, his claws sliding out with a terrifyingly familiar snikt. Nightcrawler flickered in and out of existence, leaving behind the scent of sulfur. Colossus, Rogue, Gambit, Kitty Pryde, and even the jagged, bone-clad form of Marrow stood in a semi-circle, blocking the path forward.
"The X-Men?" Richard breathed, his hands igniting. "I thought they weren't here."
"Well, here they are," Matt said, his voice tight. "These aren't the real people, Rich. I can't hear a heartbeat from any of them. They're probably robots or constructs. Whatever they are, they have weight... the way they displace the air... they're solid."
"Eight against three," Peter muttered, dropping into a crouch. "And they have a home-field advantage. Anyone got a plan that doesn't involve us getting pulverized?"
"Hit them hard, hit them fast," Richard growled, and he took flight.
The battle erupted with a violence that shook the sphere. Richard slammed into Colossus, the sound of cosmic energy meeting organic steel ringing out like a cathedral bell. But this wasn't the true Piotr Rasputin; the construct didn't feel pain. It simply absorbed the blow and countered with a punch that sent Richard sprawling across the mirror floor.
Peter found himself intercepted by Wolverine and Nightcrawler. It was a nightmare of geometry. Every time Peter fired a web-line, Nightcrawler 'bamfed' through the strand, appearing behind him with a kick that sent Peter spinning. Before he could recover, the hard-light Logan was on him, his claws whistling through the air with predatory precision.
"They're not as strong as the originals!" Peter shouted, narrowly dodging a bone-shard thrown by Marrow. "The Storm construct—her lightning is only half the voltage of the real one! But they're coordinated!"
He was right. Cerebro wasn't just simulating the X-Men; it was running a perfect tactical simulation. The constructs moved with a telepathic synchronicity that Peter, Matt, and Richard couldn't match. When Peter tried to web Rogue, Kitty Pryde's construct phased through the floor and pulled his feet under. When Matt tried to strike Gambit, Storm provided a localized gust of wind that threw off his balance just enough for a kinetic card to explode at his feet.
Matt was a blur of red, his billy clubs spinning as he engaged Rogue and Gambit. He was fighting by pure instinct now, his radar sense overwhelmed by the sheer amount of "noise" the hard-light constructs and the walls were generating.
"Peter! Twelve o'clock!" Matt yelled.
Peter looked up just as Storm unleashed a localized blizzard. The room went white. In the chaos, the Rogue construct lunged. She didn't need to steal Peter's powers; the hard-light touch was designed to drain kinetic energy on contact. Peter felt his limbs turn to lead as she brushed his shoulder.
"So they're light constructs. Then there must be emitters hidden around us. Rich! We need a clearing!" Peter gasped, his body failing under the thermal shock of the blizzard.
Richard Rider was struggling. He was being pinned by Colossus while Marrow pelted him with bone-spikes. "I'm a little busy being a pincushion, Spidey!"
"Give me everything!" Peter roared, leaping onto Colossus's back and blinding the metallic giant with a double-dose of webbing. "Now!"
Richard understood. He stopped fighting the grip and instead pulled Colossus into a bear hug. He let the Nova Force bleed out of his pores in a controlled, omni-directional pulse. It wasn't a blast meant to destroy the room, but a frequency-shift designed to shatter the hard-light coherence.
The sphere turned into a sun.
The X-Men constructs flickered. Their forms wavered, turning back into raw data-streams for a precious three seconds.
"Matt! Take out the emitters. There should also be some in the floor!" Peter yelled.
Daredevil didn't need eyes to see where the power was coming from. He felt the heat of the floor-tiles. He launched both his clubs, the vibranium-tipped weapons bouncing in a perfect geometric pattern, shattering the four primary projectors hidden beneath the mirror-glass.
With a final, distorted hiss, the X-Men vanished.
The Trio collapsed. Richard's armor was dented and scorched; Matt was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, his breathing ragged; Peter's suit was shredded, his ribs feeling like they had been through a trash compactor.
"Is that... is that it? That's it right?" Richard panted, leaning on one knee.
"No," Matt whispered, his head dropping. "It's just the end of this simulation. There could be more rooms like this up ahead."
From the center of the room, the floor didn't just open; it dissolved. Thousands of microscopic, silver machines rose like a metallic mist, swirling into a towering, humanoid shape. It had no face, only a smooth, polished visor and a body made of shifting, liquid chrome.
Cerebro.
"Your biological signatures have been recorded," the voice said. It wasn't a voice—it was a projection of thought directly into their auditory nerves. It was cold, sexless, and terrifyingly calm. "Spider-Man. Daredevil. Nova. You are outliers. Deviations from the predicted course of predicted events. You will be archived."
"Like hell we will," Richard snarled, trying to summon the Nova Force, but his hands only flickered with a pathetic spark. The previous blast had drained him to the marrow.
Cerebro moved with a speed that defied physics. It didn't walk; it simply was in front of them. It struck Richard with a tendril of liquid metal that wrapped around his throat, lifting the Centurion off the ground like a child.
Matt lunged, but the floor rose up to meet him, forming shackles of nanomachines that clamped around his wrists and ankles, slamming him face-first into the chrome.
Peter fired a desperate web-shot, but Cerebro caught the strand and retracted it, pulling Peter toward its cold, metallic chest.
"Do not resist," Cerebro intoned. "I do not wish to damage your physical forms more so than I already have. You will provide the foundation for the next iteration of the human species. Your consciousness, however is unnecessary."
Peter struggled, but the liquid metal began to crawl up his legs, cold and heavy as lead. He looked at Matt and Richard—both were being engulfed by the same silver tide. They were being restrained, their muscles forced into a state of total catatonia by localized EM pulses.
A small, needle-like appendage extended from Cerebro's palm.
"Sedative-Alpha. Commencing archive sequence."
Peter felt the needle pierce his neck. It wasn't painful, but the effect was instantaneous. A wave of artificial darkness rushed in from the edges of his vision. His heart rate slowed to a crawl. His thoughts began to fray, drifting away into a digital void.
'Ethan... you really messed up this time... no, I messed up too.' Peter thought, his head lolling back.
But as the darkness claimed him, as the "Mirror Room" began to fade into the black of the cryo-sleep, Peter's spider-sense gave one final, nonsensical prick.
He didn't see a machine. He didn't see a monster.
In the far corner of the sphere, where the shadow met the chrome, there was a figure that the sensors weren't tracking. A small, glowing girl, no older than six or seven, holding a large rabbit pulsie. She wasn't made of nanomachines or hard-light. She looked soft. Radiant.
She was standing perfectly still, watching him with eyes that were complexly black and looked like galaxies. She didn't look afraid. She looked... expectant and smiled.
She raised a finger to her lips, a silent "hush" as the world went black.
Back in New York, the sun was setting, casting long, bloody shadows over the city.
Ethan Kane stood outside his house, his phone in his hand. N.E.A.R. was silent. The "Alcatraz" signal had cut out ten minutes ago, exactly as he had predicted.
He knew they would be captured. He knew Cerebro was probably about to begin the "Archive" process. Everything was moving according to the architecture he had laid out weeks ago. Now all he needed to do was wait for the 'little girl' to make her move.
But as Ethan looked out at the skyline, he felt a strange, cold prickle at the base of his neck.
"N.E.A.R.," Ethan said quietly.
"Yes, Ethan?"
"Did we you see any... 'unauthorized' signatures arrive at the island after Peter's group? Anything at all?"
"Scanning... No such anomalies were recorded by the scanner on board the jet. The island is 100% under the control of the Cerebro unit. If you tell me what to look for, I may be of better help."
Ethan didn't reply. He thought of Destiny's actions. Why come to him now, of all time rather than later? She would only be concerned with the mutant aspect, and the only things in Ethan's proximity were the X-Mansion and Alcatraz.
"N.E.A.R.," Ethan said quietly.
"Yes, Ethan?"
"Send a message to Amy and Paige that this Sunday, I'd like to accompany them to their weekly trip to Xavier's School for the Gifted. There's something I'd like to verify there," said Ethan as he picked up a book and flipped through it at his lightning speed.
"Of course, Ethan."
Deep beneath the Pacific, in the heart of Alcatraz, the three heroes slept in cyro coffins of silver and glass. And in the corner of the room, the glowing girl sat on the floor, waiting for something.