Consciousness returned not as a gentle dawn, but as a violent electrical storm behind his eyes.
Rez gasped, a raw, scraping sound that tore from his throat. He bolted upright, his body moving with a jerk so sudden it felt detached from his will. The world resolved around him not in familiar shapes, but in a barrage of data so intense it was physical pain.
He was on the floor. His floor. The cheap, scratchy beige carpet pressed against his palms. But it wasn't just carpet. It was a topography of fibers—he could see the individual synthetic strands, the dust mites (long dead) buried deep, the faint, sugary stain from a spilled soda months ago. The information was immediate, unrequested, and overwhelming.
The sound hit next.
It wasn't silence. It was a cacophony he'd been deaf to his entire life. The low, sixty-hertz mmmm of the building's electricity was a bass note thrumming through the walls. The refrigerator in the kitchenette clicked, its compressor kicking on with a sound like a hammer on tin. Water moved through the pipes in the wall behind him—a rushing, gushing roar that mapped the entire building's plumbing in his mind. Down the hall, his roommate Leo's soft, wet snoring was a geological event, each inhalation a landslide, each exhale a sighing cavern. A car alarm, three blocks away on Flamingo Road, wasn't a distant annoyance; it was a shrieking soprano solo, each pulse of the siren a needle in his temporal lobe.
"Make it stop," he groaned, the sound of his own voice startling him. It was too loud, too resonant inside his own skull. He clamped his hands over his ears.
The action was a catastrophic mistake.
His right palm, slick with a cold, clammy sweat he didn't remember producing, slapped down onto the screen of his smartphone, which lay face-up on the floor where he'd dropped it.
It didn't just touch the glass.
It adhered.
A strange, velvety sensation gripped his entire palm—not sticky like glue, but a profound, magnetic intimacy with the surface. A billion microscopic points of contact engaged, hooking onto the molecular imperfections of the gorilla glass. He yanked his hand back in blind, panicking revulsion.
The phone didn't just come with him. It launched.
With a sharp TWANG of releasing tension, it ripped free and shot across the room like a stone from a slingshot. It traveled in a perfect, flat line, too fast to track, and embedded itself with a sickening CRACK-THUMP into the drywall opposite. Not a dent. A crater. The screen was a spiderweb of fractures, the wall around it bulging with the impact. A fine white dust sifted down.
Rez stared, dumbfounded, at his own hand. It looked normal. Pale, maybe. A little clammy. He turned it over, flexed his fingers. Nothing. No residue. He touched his thumb to his fingertips. The texture of his own fingerprints was hyper-defined, a labyrinth of ridges and valleys.
"What… the actual hell?"
A wave of dizziness, different from the post-bite vertigo, washed over him. It was the dizziness of a world whose fundamental rules had been rewritten overnight. He pushed himself to his feet, his movements feeling unnaturally light, spring-loaded. The room swayed. He took a stumbling step backward to steady himself, his palm slapping against the wall for support.
And stuck.
His entire palm, his fingers, even the cuff of his t-shirt where it brushed the cheap apartment paint—all of it held fast to the vertical surface as if welded. He pulled. A faint, unnerving ripping sound came from his skin, like ten thousand tiny Velcro hooks disengaging at once.
Heart hammering a frantic, tribal rhythm against his ribs, he pulled harder, throwing his weight back. His body came free with a soft, pneumatic POP. But the release was too sudden, the momentum all wrong. He stumbled backwards, his feet instinctively seeking purchase where there was none.
Instead of falling, he jumped. A tiny, panicked hop born of pure disorientation.
He sailed backwards, up, and over.
The world rotated in a nauseating blur. The ceiling, with its popcorn texture and glow-in-the-dark stars (half-peeled, childish), rushed toward him. Or he rushed toward it. His shoulder blades touched the rough surface.
And stayed.
He was lying on the ceiling. Upside down. Staring down at the disaster of his bedroom floor—the fallen chair, the crater with his phone in it, the empty Monster can rolling in a slow circle. Gravity had been a suggestion, and he had declined.
A scream built in his throat, a pressure of pure, animal terror. But what emerged was a high-pitched, hysterical giggle that echoed strangely in the too-bright, too-loud room. He was stuck to the ceiling. He'd thrown his phone through a wall. He could hear the city's nervous system.
The memory returned in a flash of phantom pain: the dark shape, the pulsating amber veins, the cold-fire bite that had started it all.
"The spider," he whispered to the upside-down floor. The giggle died, strangled. This wasn't a weird flu. This wasn't a bad stream hallucination or sleep paralysis.
Rez Crown, YouTube gamer, professional failure at adulting, was very, very sick.
And he was a human fly on his own ceiling.
---
The next hour was a masterclass in controlled terror.
Getting down was the first puzzle. Pushing against the ceiling just made him stick harder. Panic made it worse—the adhesion seemed to strengthen with his fear. He had to force himself to breathe, to still his frantic heart. He focused on the sensation in his palms, the subtle, muscular tension he'd never noticed before. It was a mental switch, a release of a clamp he hadn't known he was flexing.
Let go, he thought, not to his fingers, but to the skin itself.
With a softer pop, he detached and dropped, landing in a crouch that felt effortless, his knees absorbing the impact with springy silence.
He stood in the center of the room, a stranger in his own body. He held his hands up before his face. They were his hands. The same scar on the knuckle from a bike crash at twelve. The same bitten nails. But they were now interfaces to a new physics.
Discovery One: The Grip. It wasn't just his hands. Experimentation proved it was the soles of his feet, his knees, the small of his back if he pressed firmly. His skin secreted a microscopic field of electrostatic force, enhanced by countless nano-hooks he could feel flexing at will. He could crawl across his textured ceiling as easily as walking. The first time he did it, methodically crossing from one side of the room to the other, the blood rushed to his head and he vomited into his own trash can from vertigo.
Discovery Two: The Reflexes. He went to the kitchenette for water, moving like a bomb disposal expert in a room full of eggshells. He dropped a glass. Before the sound of the slip even registered in his conscious mind, before the word "oops" could form, his body had already reacted. It wasn't him. It was a subroutine. His torso twisted, his arm snapped out in a blur he only saw as an afterimage. He caught the glass an inch from the linoleum, water sloshing but not a drop spilled. His nervous system was operating on a pre-cognitive level, seeing the world in a slowed-down state of perpetual grace.
Discovery Three: The Strength. Hunger, a deep, gnawing void, finally cut through the shock. He went to open a new jar of salsa from the fridge, bracing for the usual, two-handed struggle. His right hand closed around the lid, twisted.
The metal lid crumpled like tinfoil.
At the same time, his grip on the glass jar, reflexively tightening in surprise, was too much. The jar exploded in his hand with a wet CRUNCH. Salsa and shards sprayed across the kitchen floor. He stood frozen, staring at the deformed,拧毛巾lid in his palm, at the sticky, glittering mess on the floor. He could feel the potential in his tendons, coiled and dangerous, a power that demanded constant, vigilant suppression. He picked up an empty soda can from the counter, held it lightly between thumb and forefinger, and squeezed. It compacted into a dense, tiny puck of aluminum with a faint, pathetic crunch.
Discovery Four: The Spark Sense. This was the strangest, most invasive one. It started as a low, buzzing static at the base of his skull, a psychic itch with no physical source. It wasn't a sound, but a feeling of imminent wrongness. It flared, sharp and warning, when Leo unexpectedly stumbled out of his bedroom, squinting and scratching his chest.
"Duuude," Leo mumbled, voice thick with sleep. "You okay? I heard a crash. Sounded like you threw your desk out the window."
Rez, standing amidst the salsa-and-glass crime scene, had frozen, the buzzing spiking into a needle of alarm. Threat? No. Friend. But surprise. Unpredictability. "Yeah! Yeah. Just… dropped a jar. Everything's cool." His voice sounded too high, too fast.
Leo shrugged, mumbled something about "weird energy," and shuffled to the bathroom. The buzzing subsided to a background hum. It was a raw, biological danger radar, pinging on threats—physical, social, situational—before they fully manifested.
Discovery Five: The Ion Webs. This was the one that broke his brain.
The buzzing had settled into a persistent headache, a pressure behind his eyes. The adrenaline was leaching away, leaving a crushing fatigue and the dawning, horrific scope of his situation. He sat on the edge of his stripped bed (the sheets were in a pile; he'd have to wash them, another mundane task made Herculean), and clutched his throbbing temples.
A spike of pure, undiluted panic—what if this is permanent, what if I'm a monster, what if they dissect me—shot through him. It was a helpless, full-body tremor of despair. In a gesture of utter frustration, he flicked his wrist out as if dismissing the entire universe.
From the two small, barely-noticeable pores just above the twin puncture wounds on his wrists, twin streaks of molten gold shot forth.
THWIP! THWIP!
The sound was sharp, organic, like the crack of a bullwhip. Two thick strands of glowing, filament-like material, crackling with faint amber energy, arced across the room. They struck the far wall and the leg of his desk, binding them together with a bond that sizzled for a second before cooling into a tough, flexible cable. It glowed faintly from within, like bioluminescent deep-sea rope.
Rez stared, slack-jawed. He raised his wrists, turning them in the light. The pores were visible now that he looked for them—tiny, dark dots. They tingled, a phantom limb sensation. He flexed a specific, unfamiliar muscle in his forearm.
Thwip.
A single, controlled strand shot out, sticking to his ceiling light with a soft tock. He gave it an experimental tug. It held his full weight without strain, elastic yet supremely strong. The strand was slightly adhesive, and after about thirty seconds, when he willed it to, it dissolved into a fine, sweet-smelling golden dust that vanished into the air.
Ion Webs. Radioactive silk. Bio-filament.
He sank to the floor, back against his bed, staring at the golden tether still connecting his wall to his desk. In the quiet, the hum of the city was a distant ocean. The glow of the web was the only light.
"Okay," he whispered to the empty, salsa-scented room. His voice was flat, accepting. "Okay. This is… this is not normal YouTuber content."
A hysterical laugh bubbled up again, but it was cut short.
The Spark Sense, which had been a steady background hum, suddenly screamed.
It wasn't a buzz. It was a fire alarm in his skull, a blade of ice shoved down his spine. The feeling was utterly different from Leo's surprise. This was predatory. Calculating. Observant.
His head snapped up. His eyes, now preternaturally sharp, scanned the room. Nothing. The window was closed. The door was shut. But the feeling was directional. It came from above.
Slowly, silently, he tilted his head back to look at the ceiling vent—the same vent the spider had vanished into.
There was nothing there. Just darkness behind the slats.
But the Spark Sense didn't lie. Something was watching. Not with eyes, perhaps. With sensors. With drones. With something cold and electronic.
The warmth of discovery vanished, replaced by the old, familiar clutch of fear, now amplified a thousandfold. He wasn't just a freak. He was a specimen. And the lab had just found its escaped experiment.
He was awake. And he was already in someone's crosshairs.