STAY AWAY

A mud-covered, un-washed looking man of about eighteen stumbled down the deserted street. By the way he looked over his back, he knew this was a bad part of town, and a bad time to be there.

Running between streetlights, hurriedly looking up every time one would flicker or go out, the kid made surprisingly quick progress. Rounding a corner, and running out of the circle of light cast by a streetlamp, he fell. Rolling into the gutter, he began to cough. Laboriously standing, he began running again, spitting off to the side.

He rounded another corner, and a pair of ominous-looking men rounded the first corner, and one knelt by the spot of bloody saliva on the sidewalk. Looking at the way it had splattered, he pointed in the exact direction the man had run. Both men resumed walking; following the exact path the stumbling kid had followed.

A few turns ahead, at the back of an alley formed by two apartment buildings, the kid crawled up a rusted old fire escape. Passing window after window, he would quickly glance at a piece of paper every now and again.

Almost ten stories above the ground, he reached what he was looking for. He opened the window and slid inside.

The two men rounded the corner and stalked down the empty alley, following the uneven footsteps that preceded them. At the foot of the ladder, both stopped, and looked up. One reached for the ladder, and his hand came away with streaks of mud and blood. He smiled. Looking up, he just caught sight of the tails of a torn coat slip into a window.

The other man hand dropped onto one knee, and picked something up from the ground. His muddy suit dripped as he stood again, and the other man turned, his suit also covered in mud.

The first had a piece of muddy and water-damaged paper in his hands. Carefully unfolding it, he saw that one side had a map. A quick look at it told him that it signified the path to the building that they stood behind. Turning it over, he saw the words:

STAY AWAY

TWO DAYS EARLIER

Eight o’clock in the morning; on Monday. The bell rang, and a few stragglers hurried through the gates of the public high school. Several kids hung around, those who wanted to be late, or didn’t care, or whatever.

One last figure hurried through the gates. He ran, obviously not wanting to be late. He fell through the doors of one of the numerous buildings, and took off down the hallway.

Running past a dozen doors, he wrenched open the one he needed.

“I’m not late,” he joked as he threw himself down into his chair, next to his best friend.

“Yeah, I saw you haulin’ ass right by the window,” the other replied, as the teacher, a weasel-like, middle-aged man, moved to the front of the class.

“Late again, I see,” he sounded displeased, “I expect better of you two.” He turned from the two, and started his lecture, “today we will be discussing Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” the entire class groaned collectively.

Just as he reached for his book, several of the schools numerous security guards stepped through the door. They called the name of the kid’s friend, who had that look in his eyes that said, “oh, shit.” Before he got up, he took a long time to pack up his things, and as he stood, he shoved something into the kid’s hand. “No questions,” he shot through clenched teeth.

The kid put his hand into his pocket without checking what it held.

After school, he stood around waiting for his friend. He never came. In fact, that morning was the last time he would ever speak to his friend.

Walking home, he closed his coat against the wind, and his hand slid into his pocket. It fell upon what he had hurriedly hidden there earlier.

Before he could pull it out, though, he walked by the faculty parking lot, and saw something that scared him greatly. He saw two men in suits dragging his friend towards a black sedan. “I’m telling you, I don’t have it,” and the rest of his protests were swallowed by the slam of the car door.

He walked quickly, not wanting to be noticed. Whatever was going on, he wanted no part of it.

Once he was out of sight, he reached back into his pocket, and removed what he assumed was the cause of all this. He looked into his sweaty palm to see a wrinkled piece of paper. Unfolding it, he saw a glint of metal. It looked like a computer chip, except that it was completely silver, and about the size of a dime. He picked it up and brought it up to his face to see it better. He nearly dropped it when he saw it move.

Once he got home, he put it into a glass. Ever since he had touched it, it hadn’t stopped moving. It had almost escaped his pocket twice during the walk. Looking at it, he almost laughed at the comical way it tried to crawl out of the glass. It moved just like a spider…

He stood up from his chair so fast he knocked it over. Running into the kitchen, he tore through the drawers, and, after the third, came out with a magnifying glass. He ran back into the other room.

He righted his chair and dropped into it. Bringing his face down to the table, he placed the magnifying glass against the glass and looked at the tiny creature. It looked back. As he peered at it, it turned to face him, and crawled up to the side of the glass, and looked back.

Just as this happened, he heard the television from the other room.

“Recently, the Osiris Corporation, recently involved in a terrorism scandal, has revealed a new form of medical technology, based on the failed Icarus nanotechnology…”

“How did you get this?” He questioned the air. The little chrome spider resumed circumnavigating its crystal prison.

He watched its movements for several more minutes, noticing that it’s walking was becoming more coordinated, and it kept making it further up the glass. He checked his watch.

He started when he saw the time. He had school tomorrow. Not wanting to lose this fascinating find, he turned the glass over, trapping the eight-legged wonder more permanently. His parents were on vacation, so he had no fears that the glass would be disturbed.

He awoke to the squawk of his clock, and rolled onto he floor. He stood, and stumbled into the bathroom.

Once he had showered and dressed, he walked into the living room, and went straight over to the glass.

The glass was there, but the spider was not. He panicked, not knowing what the thing was capable of; whether it was a pet, or some kind of weapon. He dropped to his hands and knees, and looked all over. He brought a hand up to move some news papers, when he saw a silver spot on the back of it.

The little spider-thing looked like it was asleep. All it’s little legs were retracted, and the tiny lights he had seen the night before were out.

Poking it with his finger, he jumped when it opened up and began moving again.

A knock at the door snapped his brain back to reality.

He clambered to his feet, and stepped over to the door, meticulously crafting his best “I didn’t do it” face. He tried to look through the frosted glass that flanked the door, but all he could see was a shadow. He held his breath, and reached for the doorknob.

“Priority mail,” a man dressed as a mailman stood on the other side, just visible through the crack that the chain on the door would allow.

“The mail doesn’t usually come by till later,” he said in his best “no bullshit” voice, and closed the door.

“Telegram?”

He still didn’t open the door.

“Shit.”

Through the frosted glass, he saw the shadow move away. “What the hell was that?” He turned, and took his hands off the door, and once again his eyes fell on the small silver spider, which had moved onto his watch. Without pausing, the small creature crawled onto the adjustment knob, and proceeded to set his watch, disturbingly precisely. He watched, fascinated, as the tiny legs spun the hands minutely, and then, finished, the creature began to crawl along the band, picking up tiny specks of dirt.

“What are you?” He plucked it off his watch with two fingers of his other hand, and brought his hand up, forefinger extended, with the dime-sized spider shifted it’s minute weight from leg to leg, as if it knew it was being questioned.

The silver spider suddenly retreated to the underside of his finger, crawling quickly down his arm.

A second later, he heard a crash behind him, and he ducked under the table. Through the chair legs, he saw that the front door was lying on the carpet, and he saw a pair of heavy boots, topped by the pressed blue pants of a mailman…

As the boots began to move, the kid panicked and bolted for the doorway.

Pushing past the man, he stumbled across the threshold, and sprinted down the walk. Halfway down the cracked strip of concrete, he tripped, and collapsed onto the hot pavement. He had landed on his wrist, and a shooting pain made him groan. He opened his eyes, and saw patent leather. Following the shoes, he looked up, his field of view passing across blue jeans, a leather jacket, and a dress shirt, right into a generic face, split by a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses, and framed by a mess of shoulder length, dark brown hair. The face cracked into a lopsided smile, revealing a few slightly yellow teeth.

“We gonna make this easy for both of us?” The words were marred by a southern drawl, and the voice itself was scratchy, as if it’s owner had had to raise his voice more than often.

“Make what easy? I don’t know anything,” he tried to raise himself from the dusty concrete, but a heavy boot pushed him back down.

“So, you want the hard way,” it wasn’t a question.

“I have rights,” he knew it was a long shot, but it was worth a try, “you can’t just do this.”

“We can, and you have no idea who we are,” the man reached down, and lifted the kid to his feet.

“I want to see a badge,” he knew it was bullshit, but he was trying to buy time. Glancing down, he saw the little spider crawl off his arm onto the man’s jacket. He cursed silently.

Outside the house, the southerner and the “mailman” whispered furiously to each other.

“He doesn’t have it on him,” the southerner adjusted his sunglasses.

“What are we gonna do? We can’t just leave him.”

“Well, we could kill him,” he joked, as he pushed his glasses onto his forehead in the twilight that comes just after sunset. Through the open doorway, the kid was just visible, a strip of duct tape hung from his face, as if it was used to gag him, and then ripped off, and his hands and feet were taped to the dining chair that he was seated in. Blood was running from his nose, which looked broken, and his chest was bruised. His head hung down, in a manner that suggested a severe beating. He coughed, and when he raised his head, strings of bloody spit connected his split lips to his chest.

“I think he knows where it is,” the “mailman” resumed the conversation, after their victim had stopped wretching.

“Yeah, but he won’t tell us,” the southerner cracked his bruised knuckles, “either he’s got one helluva pain threshold, or he doesn’t know anything,” he laughed again. A groan from the victim broke the conversation.

“I don’t think he’s goin’ anywhere, so we can call Osiris and see what they think is goin’ on,” the “mailman” said, as he turned towards the black sedan parked askew in front of the house, “but we gotta take care of something first.” He opened the door.

From his place in the house, the kid could just see when an arm swung out of the open door, and some blood dripped off of the fingers onto he sidewalk. He almost fell over in the chair when he recognized his friend’s watch, even though the face was smashed.

Just then, the southerner collapsed. No blood, no wounds, he just fell. As his body slumped, the last rays of sunlight reflected of a tiny speck that arced towards the “mailman”.

“What the hell? You okay?” The “mailman” bent down, but before his hand could reach the limp form on the concrete, his eyes flashed wide and he fell across the other man. Both figures lay motionless.

The kid, barely able to keep his eyes open through another fit of coughing, saw a figure slip around the doorframe. He finished coughing, but when he looked up, he could not see where the shadow had gone.

From behind his left ear: “where is it?”

“I told them, and I’m telling you: where is what?”

The voice moved around in front of him. He did not see what he was expecting. He had anticipated another well-dressed secret-agent type. What he saw was a disheveled young adult, wearing torn jeans, a muddy flannel shirt, and his grimy face framed with a mat of shoulder-length unwashed hair.

“Where is it?”

“It crawled off of me onto one of them,” he gestured with his chin, because the rest of him was bound tightly. He figured that it couldn’t hurt to tell the truth. This could be another trick; this could just be the end of the “mailman” ploy.

Just then, he saw a tiny bug crawl away from the body of the “mailman”. As the tiny speck grew closer to the door, he knew exactly what it was. The tiny spider-robot-thing was not a pet. It reached the doorframe and crawled into the house. As it reached the bottom of the other kid’s torn jeans, it stopped. It seemed to be waiting for something.

“Well, if you “find” it, come here. The password’s on the back, and if you don’t say it, we’ll shoot you.” He did not look like he was joking as he unbound the other, and handed him a wrinkled piece of paper. He did not seem to see the tiny cyber-bug next to his foot.

“Who are you?”

“Come to this place to answer that question,” he gestured towards the piece of paper in the cut hands of the kid in the chair.

As the other hurried through the door, the kid stood up to do the same, but realized that he could not, when he almost collapsed. He compromised for lying down on the couch.

He would just rest his head for a moment, before he left…

He ran down the street, away from the house, the bodies on the lawn, the chair left on it’s side in the middle of the blood spattered floor, away from one hell of a day.

Turning the corner, he consulted the small piece of paper he held. He held it up in the failing light, to scrutinize the crude little map. The paper itself was the corner of the page of a bus schedule, with a red line drawn from his home to what appeared to be an apartment building. The other side had some hard-to-read words scrawled across it.

He ran towards the lights in the sky that signified the outlines of office buildings, almost on the horizon. His bandaged arms pumped, and he tried to run faster. He had no idea when he was supposed to be there, but he got he feeling that he was already late.

An hour of alternately running and walking had brought him to the bad part of town. The only lights were on poles, and those shone on things he would have rather not seen.

Running past bums and drug users, he was tripped more than once by a groping, scabbed hand or the sprawled form of a comatose tweaker.

He looked over his shoulder a few times, sensing something behind him. Every time he looked, though, he saw nothing, or possibly a coattail or part of a human being duck into an alley or out of the light. That hoe could be sure of, however, because in his state, he figured it was his imagination.

Rounding a corner and slipping, he careened into the muddy gutter, and began to cough again. He laboriously pulled himself up by a streetlamp and spit a mouthful of blood and mucus of to the side as he started running again.

He rounded a corner, but this time his paranoia would not let him continue. He shuffled back, and peeked around, back the way he had come. He waited a few seconds, and then almost cried out when he saw two men in business suits round the corner and scrutinize his vomit.

That was too much. He turned and ran, not bothering to check the paper for directions. After four or five random turns, he stopped and fell against a wall. Coughing again, he tried to read the paper in the flickering lamplight.

Checking his progress, he walked to the end of the alley, and turned onto the small street. Following that, he counted alleys until finding the one he needed.

As he turned onto it, he looked back to see that the two men were just stepping out into the street.

Turning back, he saw his destination: a huge redbrick apartment building. From where he was, he saw that he could not make it around to the front doors, so he resigned himself to the fire escape.

He took hold of it, and began the laborious journey towards the cloud-choked night sky.

After three stories, he checked the paper again. It had the apartment number 10-B on it. He figured that this meant apartment B on the tenth story, and groaned. His arms hurt, and his makeshift bandages were falling apart. His arms had started to rain blood down onto the mud at the bottom of the alley.

He reached the ninth floor, and looked down. The two men had found their way to the bottom of the fire escape. Thinking fast, he tore off the part of the note with the apartment number on it, and wrinkled up the rest, being sure to get as much blood as possible onto it. Before discarding it, he looked at the password one more time. Making sure he knew it, he tried to make it look accidental when he let the ball of bloody paper fall towards the men.

He then crawled into an open window to his left, making sure they saw him. He fell into the apartment, and pulled himself up against the wall. Looking back down, he saw one of the men pick up the paper, and point up towards him. Both men then walked out of the alley, presumably to go to the front desk and ask who lived in that apartment, and probably to proceed to come here and catch him.

The kid crouched down, hoping that this apartment was empty. He crept through the dark, cramped room, hitting his shin on a couch, and managing to bloody his lip on a lampshade.

He reached the door just as he heard a key in the lock. Cursing under his breath, he slammed himself against the wall, behind the coat rack.

The door cracked, and the smell of beer drifted in as an obviously drunk man fell onto the floor. Inching around him, the kid tried not to bleed too much on the carpet, cause what would happen if this guy wakes up with a hangover and lying on a blood-soaked carpet? Questions would be asked…

He made it around the drunk, and slipped into the hallway. Looking around, he tried to se which direction the stairs were, but that was difficult do to the fact that fully half of the lights were broken. He decided to just go for it, and turned to his left, but about ten feet down the dark hall and he walked right into the wall.

A soft curse, and he spun around. He had already wasted far too much time, he felt, and walked briskly towards the stairs.

He reached the doors, but found them locked. He cursed under his breath, and started knocking. After about half a minute, he gave up, and tried to force the doors.

This didn’t work either, but as his hand left the latch, the tiny spider-creature crawled off his hand and into the lock.

“Shit,” he hadn’t come this far just to lose the damn thing…

But just as he was about to start freaking out, the lock made a loud click, and the small creature crawled out of the keyhole. He held out his hand for it, with an odd look on his face.

He swept through the doors and ran up one flight of stairs. This door was not locked.

He remembered 10-B, and started looking. To his left, he saw F, and to his right was a utility closet. He started lurching down the hallway, ungainly trying to both walk fast and read all the apartment numbers in the dark.

He reached the far end, and looked at the last door. 10-A. He turned around, and found 10-B across the hall. As he placed his hand on the knob, his other hand fell upon a light switch.

“Figures,” they put the light switch at the far end of the hall from the stairs? Then, he realized why as the elevator went BING and the doors started to open. Catching a glimpse of muddy suits, he almost fell through the door of 10-B, breathlessly rasping the words “stay away”. That was when he realized how much blood he really had lost…

Gunshots shattered his blissful unconsciousness. His eyes snapped open involuntarily, to make sure that he was not being shot.

His point of view placed him on the floor, about six feet from the door. Apparently, whoever was in the apartment had started dragging him in when someone else had tried to come in.

His back was uncomfortably sprawled across a wrinkle in the rug, so he decided to move.

Lifting himself onto his elbows, he rolled to his left, away from the door. Another gunshot, and a bullet tore into the carpet next to his shoulder. A curse, and he continued his cumbersome progress across the smoldering carpet.

Two more shots, and he heard something heavy hit the floor behind him, near the door. He quickly rolled over, and found himself caught in the glassy stare of a corpse, wearing a now bloodstained, muddy suit. He jumped to his feet, and another man, dressed in a mud stained suit, flowed around he doorjamb, and let loose a hail of bullets, apparently without aiming. A window shattered, a bullet struck something made of wood, and a hot piece of lead tore into the kid’s shoulder.

He hit the ground, just as he saw the body of the second suited figure writhe unnaturally, presumably from being shot several times. As the body struck the ground, a figure jumped over the prostrate body of the first corpse, and kicked the door shut.

He turned, pointed his gun at he kid lying on the floor, and said: “you didn’t say you were followed.”

“I thought I lost them,” the kid started, but fell silent when he saw the tiny spider exit his shirt pocket and crawl towards the bloody hole in his shoulder. Before he could stop it, it reached wound, and began to apparently mend the bullet hole.

“I’ll take that,” said the man who had kicked the door shut, “it is mine, after all,” he plucked it off the kid’s shirt, after it had finished its work.

“What are you talking about? Who the hell are you?” The pain of a moment ago forgotten, the kid turned to questions to reconcile what he had just seen.

“I made this. This, this is Icarus. You’ve no doubt heard about the ‘terrorist attack’ that brought down the Osiris Corporation headquarters. That was no attack. They stole my idea, and I destroyed them. Those nano-bots that you keep hearing about, you know, the ‘failed military technology’, those were mine. The ones that weren’t inside me, the ones they stole, I thought they were destroyed in the accident. Apparently, they weren’t. And apparently, they’ve evolved,” as he spoke, he watched the little Icarus spider crawl around his hand. “I always thought,” he said, almost to quiet to hear, “I always thought that inside me was the best place for you,” he said to the spider, “but you knew better…” As he finished his rhetoric, he suddenly snapped a small test tube around the spider. “And know we’ll find out how you knew better.”

The strange, distracted man wandered through a doorway, and closed the door.

“Sorry about him. He’s a little…weird,” said another man, either in his late teens or early twenties, wearing a black silk shirt and torn blue jeans. The kid wasn’t sure, but he looked like the man that came to his house, and told him where to go.

“He made that Icarus thing I’ve been hearing about? I thought it was some kind of weapon, and that’s why the building exploded…”

“No. Osiris tried to steal it. He,” here he gestured towards the closed door, “made it as a medical device. That’s why it’s been healing you,” the kid looked down, and sure enough, all his cuts and bruises were gone, “but Osiris wanted to use it as a weapon.”

“So, the Icarus thing was originally a bunch of tiny robots, that lived in you? And they fixed you from the inside out?”

“That’s about the size of it. But what’s creepin’ me out, is how did those tiny robots become a tiny spider?”

Now, the strange man walked back into the room, carrying the spider in his palm. “Check this out. When I put it near some of the original Icarus nanos, it got bigger. It can grow,” he held up the Icarus spider. It seemed bigger. “You know what this means? We created life. It’s done so much more than we thought. It’s evolved.”

“So, who are those guys?” The kid gestured at the bodies.

“Osiris wants it back,” he said simply, as if this explained everything.

“And they think they can find a way to turn the Icarus spider into a weapon? But what can it do, other than crawl in a little circle?”

“In theory, if you find a way to make it disassemble, it could crawl across a battlefield, and then disintegrate and be breathed by your enemy, and you could do whatever you wanted to do to him. Imagine it…all you would need to fight a war is on guy with a bunch of test tubes, and BAM,” he slammed his fist onto a table, “all your enemies explode, or choke, or whatever, depending on what button you decide to push.”

“So, logically, all we can do is destroy it, right?” The kid was frozen into silence by the frigid stares of the room’s occupant’s; coldest of all was the stare of Icarus’ creator.

“That,” he stated coldly, “is not an option.”

“Okay…so what are we going to do?” He belatedly looked down at his watch, and noticed that it was broken. Damn.

“We’re not doing anything…You are going to go home, and hopefully not tell your parents that you got shot, and I am going to keep the Icarus spider.”

The kid didn’t know what to say; he turned and walked towards the door. The Icarus creator walked into the other room. As the kid reached the door, and started to turn the knob-

“Hold it,” emitted from the other room, “what did you do?”

“Huh?”

“Once you got twenty feet away from it, it died,” the voice moved closer, and they all watched the Creator come through the door, “and know it lives.”

“What?”

“Apparently, it needs to be close to you. I thought that would be the first thing it would evolve away. Were you the first person to touch it?”

“As far as I know…when I got it, it was wrapped in paper.”

The Creator muttered a name, a name that, though barely distinguishable, sounded to the kid to be the name of his friend.

“Hold on…he worked with you?”

“That’s how you got it…they found him, and he gave it to you, didn’t he?”

The story unfolded, and ended rather quickly, as usually happens when a story is told by someone who is not adept at telling good stories.

“Now tell me why it died,” the kid had suddenly remembered the string of the conversation.

“Well, when we first made Icarus, we had problems getting it to be able to work with the human body. One of the little problems was blood type, and they only got worse from there. Then we realized that the cheapest way to do it was to make Icarus unique to its users. Each Icarus nano has the capability to imprint permanently to the body of its host. The nanos in me will never leave, or they will die. Now, the Icarus spider is imprinted on you, and if you leave it, it apparently doesn’t die, per se, but it goes dormant until it gets close to you again. Presumably it cannot work for anyone else but you, so you better take it back.”

The kid held out his hand, and felt the almost-ticklish pricks as the tiny creature crawled up his sleeves. “It has a shell,” he observed, “ it didn’t use to.”

“It must have grown it, after the shock, and with those extra nanos I ‘fed’ it...it must be a lot smarter than we gave it credit for.”

“So, again, what are we gonna do?”

“You said it killed someone…”

“Two guys…after they beat me…but it took awhile on the first guy, but the second guy went down a second after it got on him.”

“It had to learn how…but after it knew, it can hurt other people…it just hasn’t learned how to help other people, or draw power from other people.”

“Power?”

“I think it left some of it’s nanos in you, and is using them to give it power, either off of your body heat, or the small amount of electricity generated by your nerves, but to do either of those, it would have to be far more efficient than anything we have now…”

The kid suddenly looked very uncomfortable. “Inside me?”

“And the maximum range that these little guys can transmit anything,” he held up a test tube with a barely perceptible cloud in the bottom of it, “is about twenty feet.”

“So to save it, we’ve got to convince Osiris that it’s gone.”

“They’ll know.”

“Or, we’ve got to get rid of Osiris.”

“We can’t do that.”

“Lazy bastards,” he stalked away from the building, clutching his shirt around his shoulders against the cold.

The Creator had said to keep the Icarus spider, because it was no use to them dead, and it would keep the kid safe. He said they might find him, to see the Spider again, if they couldn’t grow one of their own.

He walked.

He walked more.

When he got home, he checked all his pockets, cursed, and checked them again. He sat down in a chair, and held his head in his hands. He must have dropped it.

Then, when he put his arm on the table, the Icarus spider crawled out of his sleeve, and his watch had started running again.

That’s when he knew what he had to do. He liked the Spider, and Osiris wanted it, and wouldn’t stop; unless the Spider was gone…or Osiris was gone…

He threw some clothes into a backpack, along with some things he thought he might need. A first aid kit was a lost cause, as long as he had the Spider, so he threw a knife in the bag. Once the bag was almost full, of clothes, small weapons, and a little food, he made sure he still had some space. In retrospect, it would have been smarter to put everything on top of his last item, instead of putting his fathers gun on top of everything.

He walked out onto the small porch, and looked down at the black spots that used to be his blood. He clenched his fists. No one does that to me.

He got of the bus, looking slightly worse for wear after the four-hour ride. He ducked over to the luggage compartment, and snatched his backpack away, and almost ran out of the bus terminal.

He knew that the Osiris local headquarters had gone down in a “terrorist” attack. So he went national. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but at least he was close to doing it. He had checked the Osiris corporation website at the library, across the street form the bus station. Then, he had walked onto a bus, hoping that no one would ask him for a ticket. He hadn’t thought far enough ahead to bring much money.

Now he was in the middle of one hell of a big city, and all he knew was that he was going to bring down an international corporation, because he liked his little Spider.

“You don’t think much, do you?”

He whipped around, and dropped his bag off his shoulder, and into his had. Before he did anything, though, he saw the speaker.

“How did you know?”

“You basically told us that you were planning on destroying Osiris Corporation,” said the Creator, an amused glint in his eye.

“Okay. If you’re not gonna help, then go away,” he almost walked away, but he turned back, “so, uh, how did you bring down a building?”

“Overloaded the- wait a minute,” he smiled, “figure it out yourself.”

“Are you gonna help, or not? I don’t want to waste too much time.”

“You got me curious…you got anything planned, or are you just gonna wing it?”

The kid rolled his eyes and started walking. He didn’t need to be patronized. He knew he was doing something stupid, probably ruining his life, but damnit, he didn’t need this crap.

“I’m serious,” the Creator had matched his pace, “you know, I got one thing you don’t…I’m invincible. Your Icarus spider can only repair your injuries. Mine made me superman.”

“How’s that gonna help? If we do this right, we won’t need to be supermen.”

“Okay, touché, but still…you have no idea how to do something like this.”

“Granted,” he walked faster, “but you’ve done yours…let me do mine.”

“I’m not gonna let you get yourself killed, so just go home. I can do this, and I won’t get hurt, but if you do this, you won’t come back, and there goes the Icarus spider. If we lose the spider, there goes all that knowledge. But if another building falls on me, it’s all just shits and giggles.”

The television blared from the other room, loud enough that the kid could hear it while he ate.

“Another blow to the Osiris Corporation, hauntingly familiar to the last terrorist attack on their regional headquarters-”

The kid looked at the nickel-sized button that was the Icarus spider on his sleeve, and he smiled.