The glow of monitors bathed the warehouse in a cold, bluish light, the kind that made you forget the world outside even existed. Towers of processors hummed, wires ran across the concrete floor like veins, and at the center of it all—looming over me like a coffin waiting for its occupant—was the capsule. My capsule.
I adjusted my glasses, leaning over the keyboard, fingers tapping furiously as lines of code cascaded down the screen. Addison's voice chimed in, calm and synthetic, a female tone I'd customized years ago.
"Simulation integrity at ninety-seven percent. Cross-referencing Earth-199999 timeline adjustments with Earth-616 database. Would you like me to continue running probability chains?"
"Yes," I muttered, not looking away from the monitor. "I want to see how stable the branching gets once we hit the divergence point at Tony's capture."
"Understood."
The processor racks kicked into overdrive, the fans screaming louder, but I barely noticed. My eyes were glued to the code, the models, the universe unfolding line by line. My Marvel Universe.
I leaned back in my chair, letting the leather creak beneath me. My body was exhausted, but my mind? My mind was alive. This was it. Years of obsession, of running from the miserable world I'd been born into, funneled into one impossible project.
Funny thing was, I wasn't supposed to be this smart. At least, not by anyone else's measure.
I still remembered the first comic that had truly changed me. I was six years old, sitting cross-legged on the worn carpet of my uncle's apartment. My parents had dropped me off for the weekend—again—and, as usual, he'd handed me a beat-up box of his old stuff just to keep me quiet. Amidst yellowed paperbacks and tangled cassette tapes, I found it: The Amazing Spider-Man #50.
I didn't know why I was drawn to it. The cover alone could have been a lightning bolt to the chest—Peter Parker, web-shooters dangling uselessly at his sides, walking away from the Spider-Man costume crumpled in a trash can, shoulders slumped, the city sprawling behind him like a silent witness. That mix of defeat and resolve—of a hero willing to turn his back on everything he loved because he thought he had no choice—seared itself into my memory.
And when I read it? When I saw Peter, heartbroken and angry, struggling with the weight of responsibility, choosing to walk away from it all, and yet knowing deep down he couldn't stay away forever… something inside me shifted.
Peter wasn't a billionaire. He wasn't a god. He wasn't some chosen one destined to save the world. He was just a kid—scrawny, awkward, broke. He failed, he doubted himself, he got hurt. And still, even when it seemed easier to quit, he kept going.
From that day forward, he wasn't just a character in a comic. He was my hero. And somewhere deep down, I knew I wanted to be like him—not perfect, not invincible—but unstoppable in my own way.
I didn't have many Hero's. My parents barely noticed me, except to yell when I broke something. School was a joke—half the teachers thought I was a slacker, the other half thought I was some kind of freak because I'd ask questions they couldn't answer. But comics? Comics gave me everything. The X-Men taught me about being different. Captain America taught me about courage. Iron Man taught me about building something greater than yourself. But Spider-Man? He taught me how to survive.
By the time I was ten, I wasn't just reading comics. I was studying them. Every arc, every alternate universe, every retcon. I started tracking inconsistencies, building my own "canon files." My classmates thought I was a weirdo. I didn't care.
At twelve, I hacked into my school's network. Not for anything malicious—I just wanted to know if I could. By thirteen, I was writing my own rudimentary A.I. programs, simple chatbots at first, then pattern recognition systems. Addison was the one that stuck. I gave her a name, a voice, a personality. She became my partner. My only real friend.
And by the time I hit sixteen, I had a plan.
I didn't want to just read about Marvel anymore. I wanted to live it.
That's when the capsule idea began. Not a VR headset, not some half-baked simulation—but a complete consciousness transfer. A neural bridge, threading my mind into a living recreation of the Marvel Universe.
It sounded insane. But insanity is just another word for ambition nobody else understands.
I poured years into it. Studying physics, quantum mechanics, neuroscience, dimensional theory. Teaching myself coding languages nobody uses outside of government labs. I worked in secret, scavenging parts from scrapyards, pulling double shifts at dead-end jobs just to buy processors. Every penny, every second went into the project.
Seven years. Seven years of building, breaking, rebuilding. Seven years of creating the most detailed, living recreation of Marvel history ever conceived. Every comic, every movie, every cartoon, every scrap of lore—digitized, analyzed, compiled. Addison had processed terabytes of it, weaving together a unified universe with rules, logic, and causality.
"Timeline stability at ninety-nine point two percent,"Addison reported, interrupting the swirl of thoughts in my head. The screens blinked with cascading lines of code, quantum readouts, and real-time probability matrices.
I grinned, eyes scanning the streams of data. "That's as good as we're gonna get."
"Do you wish to initiate the upload sequence?" Addison's voice was calm, mechanical, but I could almost hear the anticipation behind it.
I swiveled in my chair, fingers trailing across the keyboard to run a final diagnostic loop. Lines of green code scrolled across the monitors: phase variance recalibrated… neural resonance stable… dimensional offset confirmed… Every parameter I had spent years perfecting was flashing "optimal."
I turned to the capsule. It wasn't pretty. Industrial plating scored with welding marks, wires snaking into ports like arteries, energy cells pulsating with a faint, violet glow. But to me, it was art. My life's work condensed into metal, silicon, and code. My ticket out. My doorway into the only world that had ever mattered.
I pushed up from the chair, stretching stiff limbs, then placed a hand against the cold metal. Sparks of static danced along the plating as the neural interface hummed to life.
"This is it," I whispered. "Everything I've worked for. Everything I've ever wanted."
"Correction," Addison said, ever precise. "Everything we've worked for."
I chuckled, running a fingertip over the interface port. "Yeah. You're right. Couldn't have done it without you, Addy."
The capsule hissed, opening like a mechanical flower, revealing a nest of interface nodes, braided cables, and memory core conduits. I climbed inside, heart hammering, fingers brushing the tactile nodes as the system ran its final verification. Synaptic latency: 0.007 milliseconds… Neural imprint checksum: 100%… Consciousness buffer: primed…
Hydraulics groaned as the hatch began to close, locking me in. I ran my eyes over the touchscreens embedded in the interior wall, watching as Addison ran last-second recalibrations, adjusting energy flux vectors and neural harmonics in real time.
"Neural bridge initializing,"Addison announced. "Estimated upload time: thirty seconds. Cognitive integration at ninety-eight percent. Are you ready?"
I exhaled slowly, feeling the charged air brush my face. "I've been ready my whole life."
And then—
A deafening crash ripped through the warehouse.
"What the hell—?" I jerked upward, slamming my head against the capsule's inner frame.
The monitors flickered, warning sirens screaming in tandem with the cascading code. Addison's voice spiked in urgency. "External interference detected! Structural integrity compromised! Emergency recalibration engaged!"
The garage doors exploded inward, twisted metal shrieking as a massive white semi-truck barreled through like a battering ram. Headlights stabbed through the warehouse darkness, engine roaring like a living beast.
"Oh shit—"
The capsule's interface panels scrambled, code blinking red as internal systems attempted to compensate for the external shock. Energy cells surged, wires arced, and the neural bridge began to pulse erratically. My fingers scrambled across the control nodes, entering override sequences: flux containment… temporal damping… consciousness stabilization…
The impact was inevitable.