Mechanical-Arm Spider #72
The Everyman Project.
That was what it had been called in the years when investigative journalists still thought they could get somewhere by asking the right questions loudly enough. A tidy name for something that had never been tidy -- the systematic attempt to take what the universe distributed without logic or fairness and build it into something that could be owned, directed, scaled.
The press had loved the name almost as much as they had loved the failure, and so the failure had been given to them deliberately: a public closing, a statement about the pursuit of meta-replication being discontinued, a careful performance of institutional retreat that had cost nothing except the attention of people who would have been watching otherwise.
Dante stood at the window with the tablet against his forearm, the projections on its screen reflecting faintly in the glass. Below, Star City was still tearing itself apart, though the worst of it had moved away from his view, following the trajectory that the Spider was currently running. The feeds behind him had been tracking it continuously. He hadn't needed to look at them since he'd established the pattern.
The Everyman Project was not discontinued. It was distributed. Scattered across enough separate operational structures, in enough separate cities, that no single inquiry could find the shape of it, and even people with the means to look were limited by what they had clearance to know -- which was, by design, never quite enough to see the whole picture. Dante himself was a node, not a center. He understood that. He had made peace with it in the same way you make peace with any condition that also happened to be profitable.
Gotham's node had been called Project Mutant. Had been funded at three times Star City's budget for two consecutive years, running on the theory that distributing enhancement across multiple subjects with multiple capability profiles was more resilient than concentrating capability in fewer bodies. A sensible theory. A wrong one, as it turned out, because resilience and effectiveness were not the same thing, and the Spider had demonstrated the difference in a building in Gotham two days ago with enough thoroughness to constitute data.
The data was what Dante kept returning to. Not the loss itself -- losses were a line item, something to be absorbed and accounted for -- but what the loss indicated about the relative positioning of the two programs and what that positioning meant for the question of funding. Gotham's project had folded. The money that had been sustaining it was going to move somewhere, and the argument for where it should move had just been made, live, in downtown Star City, by two subjects running a field test that Dante had authorized because the opportunity had arrived before he'd had time to construct a better rationale for it.
He believed in the opportunity. He had believed in it the moment the Spider's trajectory had put him nine blocks from the Castellan Building, and his belief had not diminished in the intervening hours. Founder was built on a principle that Gotham had dismissed -- that specialization compounded, that two subjects optimized for a single attribute outperformed four subjects optimized for four attributes when the attribute you specialized in was strength, because strength was the only thing that mattered once everything else was stripped away. Gotham had laughed at that argument. Star City was demonstrating it, and whoever controlled the pen when the after-action report was written would control the narrative about which model deserved the surviving budget.
He was running the numbers on that -- on how much of Gotham's redirected funding would reach his operation versus how much would get absorbed by the layers above him on the way down -- when Raines knocked and came in without waiting.
"Sir." She had her earpiece in and her tablet up, which meant it was live. "You have an incoming call."
"Not now."
"Sir --"
"If it's the Ninth Circle, tell them I'm managing the field activation and I'll have a preliminary report within the hour. They can convene whatever session they want when I have results to present." He didn't look away from the window. "Whatever concerns they have about authorization, I'll address them once there's data worth discussing."
"It isn't --"
The monitors changed.
All of them at once, without any input from the panel on his desk -- the security feeds and projection overlays collapsing into a single image that centered itself across all four screens with the particular efficiency of someone who hadn't bothered to ask for access because asking had never been relevant to how he operated. The man on the screens was in a car, moving, with city terrain shifting behind him in the window. He looked like what he was: a person who had been the most composed individual in every room he'd ever entered for long enough that the composure had stopped being a performance.
Dante set the tablet on the window ledge.
"Mr. Luthor." He kept his voice even. "I was going to contact you this evening."
"You deployed Project Founder without submitting the target profile for review." Lex Luthor's expression didn't shift toward anything that would have given Dante a direction to read. "I'd like to understand why."
"The Spider came to us. His condition at the point of subject deployment suggested a window --"
"Dante." The word was quiet and it stopped him completely. "Do you understand that I'm looking at the same data you have? That I've been looking at it since before you entered your authorization codes?" A pause that carried nothing except its own weight. "Walk me through what Arm and Leg are carrying. Not because I need the information. Because I want to hear how you justify it."
Dante's jaw tightened. "Neuro-mech integration, full-sleeve on both subjects. The enhancement architecture runs on a Kobra-Venom compound -- modified strain, developed specifically for sustained load output without the degradation ceiling that limited Gotham's biological work. Energy projection on the right arm is currently stable, we resolved the discharge irregularity six months ago." He kept his voice measured. "The SpeedForce research is preliminary, but the flash-step application is functional and field-tested under controlled conditions. Between the two of them, the strength output exceeds anything Mutant was running, and the enhancement structure is considerably less likely to fail under sustained pressure."
Lex looked at him from four screens simultaneously and said nothing for long enough that Dante understood, with more clarity than he usually allowed himself, that the man had known all of it before he started talking.
"You're not wrong about the subjects," Lex said finally. "That's not the problem." He shifted slightly and the light in the car behind him changed. "I'm not calling to stop the activation. You have project leads for that. What they do with your direction is between you and them." A pause, shorter this time. "I'm calling because there's a parameter your field test doesn't currently account for, and I want it accounted for."
Dante waited.
"I want the Spider." Lex's eyes hadn't moved from the camera since the call began. "Alive is preferable. Intact enough to study is the floor. Whatever condition he's in when your subjects bring him down -- I want him delivered. Not logged as a result. Not processed as a casualty statistic. Delivered." The word had the weight of something that had already been decided some time ago and was only now being communicated. "Make sure your people understand that distinction before this goes any further."
The screens returned to what they'd been showing. Security feeds, projections, the funding model still open on the third monitor to the version Dante kept coming back to. Raines was still by the door.
Dante picked the tablet up from the window ledge.
"Connect me to Arm," he said. "Now."
🕸️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕷️🕸️
The webline caught the Arm's mechanical elbow at the joint and Jake hauled on it, angling his body weight into the pull the way you do when the thing you're pulling on doesn't move the way physics says it should.
For two full seconds he had real leverage -- the Arm's frame coming forward, the mechanical fingers clawing at the web material with a grip that said a lot about how thoroughly the neuro-mech integration translated instinct into output. Then the Leg was behind him, the foot connecting with the back of his thigh in a short, deliberate strike that wasn't trying to send him anywhere, just trying to make him let go, and it worked, because his leg buckled and the angle broke and the webline went slack.
He released it. Fired another to his left, swung wide, dropped onto a car hood that caved under both feet but held, and stood there for a moment while they repositioned.
He'd stopped fighting the rhythm of it. There was a grammar to how they moved together -- the Arm took distance when Jake pushed in close, the Leg closed distance when Jake created the space for a range approach to matter -- and the grammar was consistent enough now that he could read it a full second before it happened, which was the only reason he was still reading anything.
Between them they were bracketing his options in a way that kept him moving, and moving was what was keeping him functional.
Four hours, maybe. Somewhere in that range, before Sleeper's withdrawal became a problem he couldn't manage around. The symbiote was running depleted -- he could feel the difference in the suit's coverage, the places where the reactive mass was thinner than it should have been, the slight lag between his movement and the material's response that meant Sleeper was compensating rather than operating. The Canary Cry had taken something that a full night's rest would have restored under different circumstances, and the circumstances hadn't been different for long enough that he'd stopped tracking when they'd stopped being so.
He'd had a plan before the compound cracked. A rough plan, assembled out of the particular optimism that sets in when your options narrow enough that any path forward starts looking reasonable by comparison. A Kobra-Venom approximation -- processed strain, imprecise, enough to push his endurance ceiling through a few more hours of this. Joker Toxin derivative in a suppressed quantity, enough to lower the threshold on his body's pain response without the full neurological rewrite that made the compound genuinely dangerous. Not clean. Not something he'd have attempted under any circumstances that left him room to think carefully about what he was doing. But the compounds had cracked, and the plan had cracked with them, and he'd filed it under things that hadn't worked and kept moving because that was the only available option.
The Arm discharged. Jake went right without deciding to, the spider-sense handling the geometry while the rest of his attention stayed elsewhere, and the blast crossed his previous position and opened up an engine block on a parked truck with a sound like something structural giving way.
He watched the arm resettling after the discharge -- the elbow absorbing the recoil and distributing it upward through the shoulder, the fingers spreading fractionally on the release and then tightening back into the ready position. He'd been watching it long enough now to know the rhythm. The way it moved was precise in a way that biological movement wasn't, each joint returning to exactly the position it had been in before, no drift, no compensation for fatigue, because the arm didn't fatigue the way the body attached to it did.
His left arm ended at the elbow.
It had ended there long enough that the absence had stopped feeling like a subtraction and started feeling like a condition -- the way weather eventually stops being something that happens to you and starts being something you account for automatically. A mechanical arm wouldn't be a restoration of anything. It would be a supplement. A different tool that occupied the same anatomical space and happened to come with a strength output that didn't run on the same dwindling reserves as everything else he was currently running on.
If the interface was readable. If the neuro-mech integration was the kind that responded to voluntary nerve signal rather than a proprietary biological key -- the kind built to be modular rather than exclusive -- then the interface point at the elbow joint was all that stood between that arm and someone else's use of it.
He needed to be close enough and fast enough and have enough left to make that work, which was a lot of conditions to satisfy simultaneously at the tail end of a night that had been systematically removing his resources.
He fired a webline at a fire escape overhead, changed his angle, came in from the left at a trajectory that made the Arm's discharge track follow him through a turn it wasn't quite fast enough to lead properly -- and then the Leg flash-stepped and arrived at the edge of his peripheral vision moving faster than the spider-sense could fully process, the foot already sweeping low, and Jake jumped the sweep and came down on the Leg's mechanical shin with both feet and pushed off it like a platform, launching himself upward and backward while the Arm's fist came through the space he'd just left and hit nothing except the air that Jake had been occupying two-tenths of a second earlier.
He landed on a car roof, which buckled under him, and stood on the caved metal and breathed.
They were already repositioning. Moving apart from each other with the unhurried deliberateness of two people who understood that urgency wasn't a factor on their end -- spreading back out to the specific angles they'd been maintaining all morning, the ones that covered his options in both directions simultaneously. The Arm raised its hand and the blue light gathered at the palm, faded and slightly uneven compared to when the engagement had started but still functional, still enough.
He was calculating the approach -- the webline that would get him close enough to the Arm's elbow joint, the angle he'd need to hold Sleeper back from consumption long enough to work the interface point rather than just responding to threat proximity -- when both of their visors flickered.
Not a combat response. He knew what those looked like by now, the slight shift in the red-screened eyepieces when they were tracking him through a complex background. This was something arriving. Both visors strobing in the same short pattern simultaneously, repeating once, going still.
They stopped moving.
And then they looked at each other -- a glance that crossed the fifteen feet between them in a way that required no words and communicated something he couldn't read from the outside, something that had clearly been communicated from the outside to both of them at the same moment -- and nodded. Small. Deliberate. Resolved.
Jake held his position on the car roof and watched the nod and filed the fact that their instruction had just changed without understanding yet what it had changed to.
The Arm lowered its open hand. Palm forward, fingers spread -- a gesture that sat somewhere between stop and come here.
His eyes went to the elbow joint.
To the interface point where the mechanical structure met biology, where the neuro-mech integration converted nerve signal into articulated motion, where -- if the engineering was what he thought -- voluntary input from someone else's nervous system was the only real barrier between that arm and someone who needed it.
He thought about four hours.
He thought about what came after them.
He thought about the fact that the arm in front of him.
The distance between them.
And how fast he would close it.
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